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You’re trying to update your blog but something is not right.

Maybe you can’t upload an image or your posts won’t save.

You log in to your cPanel to find out you are out of web space.

How can that be when you host all your heavy audios, videos and downloadable files on Amazon?

Here’s what you should check.

How many themes?

It’s so easy to get carried away test driving themes – especially when you’re getting started. You settle on one and as time goes by, forget the rest. Individually they are not very large but upload many and watch your disk space fill up. All you need is your existing theme, it’s parent and one default theme as a fallback. Everything else is unnecessary.

Unused plugins

Same thing with plugins. Time to do some housekeeping of unused plugins.

Catchall email, also known as default address

Some hosts these days have this disabled but it’s still a good thing to check. I remember when I was a rookie webmaster, my web hosting account was full to the brim and there was nothing huge in my files. There wasn’t even any database or WordPress.

The culprit was the catchall email. When you have it turned on and set to forward to system account, nobody sees these emails but it gets stored in your website’s master email account. After collecting spam all that time, it finally filled up my disk space. Clearing this takes care of the issue.

The good news is, you don’t have to empty it by hand. Ask your web host to help clear it all in one go. After that, don’t forget to change your default email setting to fail so you won’t have this issue again.

Server error logs

Some servers are set up where all errors get saved. As time goes by, this file can get huge. I’ve seen them a few gigabytes large! These files are normally named error_log with no extensions and are generally safe to remove.

Before deleting, I like to open them up to quickly check if the errors are recent and need to be attended to.

Just keep in mind you, won’t be able to do it for one that is very huge because they are too large to open reliably. In that case, it’s just best to simply remove them and check back in a day or two for new log files that are small enough to open so you can see if you need to act on it.

Check for backups

WordPress backups or cPanel backups you performed and forgotten about can take a huge bite of your disk space. Download them to your computer or save them to the cloud where they are better off to be stored anyway. You don’t want to be without access to your backups when the site disappears.