Keeping Tabs on Site Capacity

In a recent post, we wrote about some backup strategies to help you better manage your website. But a great site management plan doesn’t stop at backups. Another thing to keep an eye on is the storage capacity of your server/plan.

Some websites are hosted with unlimited storage space, including some sites using a shared host, but if your site is using a VPS or Dedicated Server you should add storage monitoring to your to do list to make sure you don’t run out of space.

What happens when you run out of space?

• You can’t upload photos
• You can’t update or add content
• Visitors will likely receive an error in their browser

How do you prevent this from happening?

• Regularly monitor your hard drive usage (Purrly Digital runs a script once a day for all of our maintenance clients to check the usage of the system’s hard drive and report to us if the usage goes over 75%)
• Store all backup files in a compressed and zipped file type
• Only backup absolutely essential files (a lot of site owners accidentally backup the backup files)

Don’t wait until you run out of space to fix issues

Fixing a system that has run out of space is a big hassle. It’s time consuming and stressful to sacrifice files so that the server level commands will actually run and then decisions have to be made about what to do long term to prevent it from happening again. Setting things up right for your site the first time, and managing capcity from the beginning, is a much easier solution.

Want some help?