My hosting site sent me several automated over-limit email messages for three days, but not today.

The host gives me access to the site via Plesk 8.3. Logging in there, it shows:
Disk space limit: 350 MB
Size: 341 MB

When I got the messages, size was just over 350: 351.84, 351.82, and 351.40 And now it shows 341.

When I back up my database, I get about 106 MB, and that compresses down to 22 MB.

So my question is, do you think the 350 MB is about the database size for my forum?

And how could the size change from 352 to 341 with no interaction by me?

And a parallel issue:
The plesk screen shows my traffic at 2.71 GB/Month with a limit = 29.3 GB, while webstat on the site shows 26526524 Kbytes, (or 26.6 GB) for October. Can anyone help me make sense of these figures?

Thanks!!!
btw, check out the top left portal here. It is a current web cam thumbnail, and if you click on it, you get the full-size picture.

Well, this month just started, it's the 4th, so ofcoarse your bandwidth quota won't be anywhere near your max.

The size fluxuation could be solved by apache (the webserver) compressing its logs of your site at the end of the monthly cycle.

How the webserver handles logs logs is, they have a "current" log (/var/log/httpd.log for example), at the last day of the month this log is compressed (into say /var/log/httpd1.tgz) and new 0 byte file is created. Prior to compression this log could be any real number, i've had weblogs 80mb+ which would definitely be your problem here. Also, generally, they'll have it save a few log files (3-5 cycles worth)

(note that not all logs are compressed monthly, in fact I have them on my server set to cycle every other week)

All in all, 350mb webspace is quite puney... I can't believe there are actually hosts out there still which offer such small plans...

I have a disk space of 2GB and that's not even on a top package!

Maybe you should look in to another hosting company or do some pruning. Do you really need a forum with over 8K posts dating back to 2002?

It looks like you have two ubb forums running.
But the two together would be below the 350MB.
I would think.
Since none of us know what else you have saved to your site?
Gizmo's statement about the logs is correct about the minor changes in file storage but it could be a culprit meaning that old logs need to be pruned.
Or you could also have some native email accounts that need to be cleaned out.

What you really need to do is use the control panel in conjunction with FTP and find what you have on the site.
And do some housekeeping.

I sure appreciate the replies. I'll look at the site to determine how much space is used in all those directories and subdirectories. I use WS_FTP and FileZilla -- is there any tool within either of those that can walk the directory tree and report the total space used? (I don't see one.)

> It looks like you have two ubb forums running.
Actually the two sites are completely independent of each other. They're using the same hosting service, but that is all.

If they are different accounts then the two sites would not be combined for disk storage.
I don't use plesk but most hosting control panels usually have a view for things such as disk storage.

I would start with looking at logs and email accounts.
If you setup a catch all email account in the beginning days 2002+
There could be MB's (or GB's) of email in there that never went anywhere and just sitting there using disk space.

This is an old thread, but I thought I'd update it with recent information.

The issue indeed is the logs kept by the server. I, as a paying customer of the hosting site, cannot access those logs.

But the host site admin wrote:

It's not the statistics you can't see. It's mostly taken up from your daily log files. We keep 3 days worth of logs and you're averaging about 40MB per day.

...they look like this:

209.66.200.51 - - [08/Jun/2010:07:42:18 -0700] "GET /forum/images/general/default/toggle_closed.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 303 "http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)"
209.66.200.51 - - [08/Jun/2010:07:42:18 -0700] "GET /forum/images/forumimages/default/bbtitle_stor_mtn.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 304 "http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)"
209.66.200.51 - - [08/Jun/2010:07:42:18 -0700] "GET /forum/images/icons/default/book.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 303 "http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)"
209.66.200.51 - - [08/Jun/2010:07:42:18 -0700] "GET /forum/images/icons/default/grin.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 303 "http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)"
209.66.200.51 - - [08/Jun/2010:07:42:18 -0700] "GET /forum/images/general/default/nonewposts.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 304 "http://www.whitneyportalstore.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/cfrm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.3; OfficeLivePatch.0.0)"

That's a bit harsh. On a hosting plan with such a limited amount of space, those logs really shouldn't count against it. Or at least the old log files should be compressed to keep the space used to a minimum.

Well, that's interesting. I've been considering moving my site to dreamhost (Recommended here).

I'd really like to open up some picture gallery capabilities.

All I need to do is find the time.

Speaking of time, if anyone is curious, check out the two webcams on the WhitneyZone site. They have consumed a bit of my time lately.

Love the webcams. You ever climbed to the top?

Both of 'em! Spent the night on top of Whitney twice.

Very cool. That's something I've always wanted to do but I'd probably die of exhaustion along the way