Hi Visitor

It's getting to that time of month again when you may or may not be receiving mails about your disc space and bandwidth usage so I thought I might draft a quick newsletter explaining what these are, how they affect your website and what possible measures can be taken to reduce these.

In this issue...

Reviewing Disc Space and Bandwidth Usage

The best way of doing this is by logging into your Control Panel or cPanel as it's called in the trade. This gives you access to a lot of information and complete administrative control of your domain(s) and website(s). To access this simply go to http://www.YourDomain.com/cpanel and insert your user credentials (these are mailed to you along with a payment request on the first of each month).

I have also installed a module on your website that can be accessed without logging into your cPanel. Simply login to the front end of your website and you'll see a module called "cPanel Info Pro" which details the following:

Disc Space Usage

This relates to how much data (images and files) are on your domain. This could include mails, images, web pages, documents and files. This will normally be OK and if it reaches 80% a notification is sent from the server. At 90% another warning is sent and at 100% you will be unable to upload any images or send mail.

I've also taken the liberty of looking at each account this last couple of months that is using almost all the disc space available and removed mail and image files where necessary.

Bandwidth Usage

Unlike disc space usage bandwidth is calculated and reset on a monthly basis. Therefore, if you receive a notification towards the end of the month that you have used 80% of your allowance I wouldn't worry too much. However, if you get this notofication early in the month then you'll probably find that I am already monitoring it for you and may even contact you to suggest an upgrade.

Please note: I would never allow a site to go offline due to excess bandwidth usage. A temporary upgrade can easily be applied until the month end and then the account can be upgraded on a permanent basis.

What Can You Do To Limit Excess Usage?

In the case of disc space usage this is quite simple. We can look for old archives that are not used, mail folders that can be deleted and images that are no longer referenced.

In the case of bandwidth usage it's not that simple as we have very little control over who visits the site and what they look at. High bandwidth usage is usually the effect of high traffic and as such the website should be receiving a large amount of visitors ergo: more customers for you...!

As always, if you have any questions please feel free to get in touch...