How to Solve Disk Space Full Problem in Cpanel

Today was a pretty surprising day for me because i recently transferred this blog to a new dedicated server in order to make sure it can handle traffic spikes at any time and i can stop worrying about the downtime and loss in revenue. While transferring the whole domain through Whm to Whm via direct server transfer it took me around 2 hours of times , with a few clicks the whole 5500Mb of data was transferred and the site was in short totally cloned into the new server and i only had to change the name servers for the domain to direct the visitors to the new server based website. Thats it the server migration job was real easy but then started the issues.

Awstats Updation Problem :
First i found that awstats were not being updated because of the following error and i contacted my server management company for getting into this problem and sorting it out as soon as possible so i don’t end up losing any stats.

Problem :

Flush history file on disk (unique hosts reach flush limit of 20000)

Their Reply :

I checked and the log had over 30,000 entries in it. I ran the stats from ssh and it worked fine. I waited a few minutes for some more log entries and I ran the stats from the Update Now button and it worked fine. I checked the logs and it appears that the memory limit was set too low for it to work with such a large log. I increased the limit to a safe value but still if the log is too big it won’t be able to do it from the Update Now button. You will have to wait for it to run via SSH.

ok, problem solved and now i had all the stats up with data for 2.5 days missing because of some issues and now again after a months time the same problem came up. I looked into this issue and found that there was no problem with the memory because this was cross checked with the server management company. Along with this my staff messaged me saying that they were not able to upload images through ftp software and this was another issue which i felt would be sorted once i restart the ftp server but that too didnt help.

Disk Space Problem :
Since the problem was not being detected on why the awstats is not updating & why ftp was not allowing us to upload files, the server management team went into the inner logs and found out that the problem was real simple, Disk Space Full. Which means that my account which was using 5500Mb of space was currently full and was using 53000Mb of data. Isn’t it a shocking figure to know that your sites disk usage increases by 10 times and you dont have any idea whats the reason behind it.

Under Cpanel you have a option – ‘Disk Space Usage’ which you need to access in order to find out the list of all the sub folders and files based on the size. This is where i found out which folder was taking the highest space and again i found out that the Help Desk was taking in 41134.70 Megabytes of disk space which is a real big number and it should be reviewed thoroughly because the folder may have been compromised and the hackers would be uploading files or else they would be hosting phishing pages which are both very serious problems.

You need to always check out your websites folder permissions to make sure there is no public access given because it can lead to hackers hosting any stuff on your server which when found can give you problems from the data center. Also try to use different server antivirus to know if your files are infected or not.