How to Manage Hosting Account Quotas and Overages?

As a website owner, it's important that you become familiar with these steps to prevent overage. Earth Girl Hosting offers some plans (Site Builder) with FlexUse billing so your account will never go down due to overage! Some of our other plans (Premiere) do not include FlexUse, so you will never get charged more, but if you reach the storage or bandwidth limit, your website will stop working until you reduce those.

Get the Details

  • Log in to your Client Area with us to see what resources are over limit.
  • Click Services.
  • Click the Active button to the right of the hosting package for your hosting account.
  • View the Usage Statistics section. This updates once a day. To view more up-to-date statistics, log in to your cPanel (a link to cPanel is found on the right sidebar on that same page).

Disk Space

Remove any unneeded files in your hosting account.  If you need assistance, contact our Tech Support. If there are no files that can be safely removed, consider upgrading to a higher plan:

  • Follow the first 3 steps in the Get the Details section above.
  • Click the Upgrade/Downgrade button on the sidebar.
  • Select The Earth Plan or WP Site Builder Pro or a plan of your choice and continue checkout. If you don't find the plan you need, reach out to us and we'll create a custom plan for you.

Which Files are Taking Up Space?

It's not always possible to tell you which files are taking up the most space, but you can get a general idea in your cPanel.

  • Follow the first 3 steps in the Get the Details section above.
  • You'll see some cPanel data there. Click on Log in to cPanel on the sidebar.
  • Click the Disk Usage icon.
  • This should give you a breakdown of where most of your files are. If you see that the mail/ folder bar is taking up a large portion of your hosting account, go in and delete some emails from your webmail. Be sure to remove emails from your trash folder as well.
  • If your public_html/ folder is where the bulk of your files are, that's normal. Remove any old backups you may have sitting there, or contact support for assistance.

For more information, see our documentation Disk usage analysis.

Bandwidth

What to Look for & Consider

  1. Are you uploading/downloading a lot of content to or from your site?  Are you using high-resolution images for your products?
  2. Are you using a paid traffic service? This will eat up bandwidth with little, to no, results in sales (and they're against our Terms of Service). Cancel those services ASAP.
  3. Is your site traffic legitimate? (Are you getting thousands of hits from Ukraine but you don't market there?).
    • Follow the first 3 steps in the Get the Details section above.
    • Scroll down and click Metrics.
    • Click the AWStats icon.
      • Adjust the date settings on the top of the screen to be sure you get a good sampling of data.
      • On the left, click Locales (under the Who heading) - From here you'll see if you have too many hits from another country.
    • On the left, click Hosts > Full List.
      • This will show you columns where you can easily see who us using up the most bandwidth. Copy any IP address from the left column, then go to https://www.ip-tracker.org/ and find out from where that IP address originates.
      • Block the IP address(es) in cPanel > IP Blocker. Or, send it to us and we can block it server-wide.

If you've determined that the bandwidth is legitimate, and you think it will continue at these levels, it's time to upgrade to a package with unmetered bandwidth:

  • Follow the first 3 steps in the Get the Details section above.
  • Click the Upgrade/Downgrade button below your package name.
  • Select The Earth Plan or WP Site Builder Pro or a plan of your choice and continue checkout.
  • If you've determined that the bandwidth is legitimate but you don't plan on utilizing as much next month, you can safely leave it as is and just pay the FlexUse overage charge. Bandwidth resets to zero at the beginning of each month.

Unmetered vs. Unlimited

Why shouldn't you just go with a host who offers unlimited everything?

By nature, servers just cannot be unlimited in space. Sure, they can be really big; however, if a host offers unlimited space, it's a marketing tactic. I prefer to call it like it is - unmetered. This means we don't babysit your usage on these plans unless something looks fishy.

As for unlimited bandwidth, the server still has limits but it's very difficult to reach those limits and doesn't usually happen. If you put unlimited traffic on a freeway, what happens?  Traffic jam!  The same goes for servers.  We won't play 'big brother' on the unmetered plans unless it doesn't look legitimate.

Earth Girl Hosting is pleased to offer quality servers and service. The all-you-can-eat attitude in hosting leads to more frustration than it's worth, so we've opted to provide carefully structured packages for your level of business.

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

About Earth Girl Hosting

Earth Girl Hosting offers web hosting for any type of website, including WordPress, OpenCart, Joomla!, Drupal, and more. Free SSL, free daily backups, 24/7/365 North American support by phone & ticket.

1 Comment

  1. […] and never experience downtime. To learn more about managing hosting quotas at Earth Girl, read the "Manage hosting account quotas and overage" […]

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