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ALL ABOUT QUOTAS

• Disk Space Storage
• Bandwidth Transfer
  

What are disk quotas?
Disk quotas are an assigned maximum limit for the amount of disk space your (hosting) account can use on our server disks (server hard drives). The account quota has a limiting effect to include ALL types of file storage on the server:  web pages/images/audio/video, email (messages & attachements in an explicit mailbox, or being held temporarily during the forwarding process), MySQL databases, web access log files, and any other file storage that may be used by any application for you on this server.

Quotas are imposed to divide up the disk resources on our servers among our various clients-- this allows reliable and high-performance file access even if one account becomes disk-hungry. Other accounts are always guaranteed to be able to use the amount of file storage allocated to them.

In addition, each mailbox on the server has a mailbox quota, which operates similarly. The mailbox quota can be managed by you the client via your Cpanel's Mail> Manage> Quota setting. Often each mailbox does not have a quota assigned to it. This is a personal preference or account set-up strategy that you can customize as needed. If someone were to send a large amount of email to a no-quota mailbox, then it would accept the messages (with large attachments) until the entire account quota was filled.  At that point then ALL mailboxes are prevented from receiving messages and anything that takes disk quota (like customer inquiries etc.) could not proceed. Thus individual quotas protect the rest of the account from runaway single accounts.

A point of confusion that sometimes arises is around the term "inbox" - if you use a mailreader application such as Outlook, then two folders exist that are both referred to as "inbox": one INSIDE your own PC (associated with Outlook), and one INSIDE our server computers which receive the emails from the internet. Outlook "polls" (checks in) your server mailbox to see if there are any new messages: if there are, Outlook downloads them from your hosting account's INBOX (on the server) to your Outlook INBOX folder. Thus if you "Leave Messages On Server", that disk space quota can become filled. See more information about the POP3 inbox on the server.

See more details here about tracking down which mailbox is causing your quota woes.

How can I view my master account quota and email mailbox quota?
Login to your Cpanel, and on the entry page, your account quota remaining and disk usage are displayed (add together usage+remaining to determine your quota). The disk usage is all-encompassing of the types of files and usages listed above.
You can view your email mailbox quota by clicking on Mail Menu >Add-Remove Accounts > Quota (or Show Disk Space Used).
Even though you may have your email box quota set to "unlimited" it still must fit within the total master account quota allocation.

Can I increase my quota?
You can edit your own mailbox quota (most people leave it as "unlimited"). However, you must contact us to increase your master (overall) hosting account quota. See the Add-On fees list for each additional 100M of disk storage allocated to your hosting account quota. A Mailbox quota is a subset (and different from) the overall account quota (see details).

What does an email message mean that tells me I'm nearing my quota?
You may receive a machine-generated warning message via email that informs you that your master account disk usage is almost at the maximum allocated. Your web site and email will still operate normally, however, you would want to take steps to either delete some files, or request to have your disk quota increased.
See examples below.

An email warning message is sent for the account's disk quota nearing or exceeding its quota; no warning is sent for an individual email box's quota.

What is the difference between the account's DISK quota and an EMAIL BOX quota?

The hosting account has a master disk quota which is the amount of space that all web pages, databases, file storage, and email boxes use. This disk quota is usually 100M, 200M, etc. (where M is Megabytes).

Each email box can optionally have its own individual quota, which sets the maximum amount of space usable for that particular email address which includes messages (and attachments) stored on the server in the inbox, sent items, trash, etc.   At the time of email box creation by your administrator or web host, the email quota can be set (or modified at any time thereafter). A typical quota for a mailbox is 10M. Note that email message file attachments can take up 5-10M per attachment, especially if it's a video or large graphic file.  If an email box is over quota, a sender to that address will receive a rejection error message:

mailbox is full: retry timeout exceeded

What do I do to fix an emailbox Disk quota exceeded error?
If your email mailbox usage is near your mailbox quota OR your master account usage is near its quota, people sending you email or large attachments may have their email to you rejected with an error message:
    Delay(error) reason: Disk quota exceeded:
    mailbox is full
You need to determine which quota is the culprit: the master account quota or the email mailbox quota. See above to view these quotas.

• If it's your email mailbox, you can change it yourself (up to the maximum allowed for your overall account quota) by logging in to your CPanel> Mail Menu> Manage Accounts> Change Quota.
• If it's your master account, contact SherwoodHosting.com via a support ticket.

What is bandwidth? (a.k.a. "traffic")
The term bandwidth has two meanings (in the context of computers and data transmission; there are other contexts in other engineering fields, unrelated):
The first is a more engineering term that is used to measure how fast your web server can transmit your web data onto the internet to get it going to your reader's computer (i.e., how much data per second). SherwoodHosting servers have redundant network connections to the internet backbone and have those connections rated to be the highest speed possible using the latest technology networking equipment.
The second definition is a more common, albeit informal, usage that means the amount of traffic your email and web viewing usage has come to our servers.  In simple terms, if a 1-MegaByte .mpg music audio clip was listened to (downloaded) 500 times, then that would constitute a bandwidth usage of 500M and that is the basic quota for Plan D, which can easily be extended (however unless you are a large gallery or CD sales company that has visitors who view large file videos, audios, or a library of PDF reference documents/catalogs, you'll likely easily never come close to the basic quotas). Sometimes this is referred to as some combination of the words: bandwidth transfer traffic. Read on for why we impose quotas.

What is a transfer/bandwidth quota
We impose a quota on the amount of traffic at each of our clients' web sites so that we can maintain fast & reliable delivery of your files to your viewers. If there were no quotas, then an over-active high-traffic web site (usally a good thing) could slow down access for our other clients on the server.
All files (web pages, text, images) accessed by people browsing your web site constitutes web site traffic, also known as data transfer. For example, every time a web page, image, midi file, mpeg audio or video, e-mail, etc. is loaded or transferred from or to a server, a data transfer occurs.  All hosting plans include a monthly limit for the amount of web site traffic, also known as a bandwidth quota. This quota is rarely reached unless you have (1) huge MP3 or video files that are downloaded frequently, or (2) pages in your web site that are tremendously popular and are viewed by thousands of people. Web traffic quota measurement is reset at midnight on the first day of each month.

What do I do when I try to access my web site and I get a "Bandwidth Exceeded" error message?
Your monthly transfer quota has been reached and you need to contact us to request us to increase your quota. This usually takes a few hours to take effect and allow your web site to be viewable again. Fees for transfer quota increase Add-Ons are shown on our Plans page. Toward the end of the month this may happen if you've advertised your site in a magazine or in a newsgroup, chat room, or other web media.

How can I view my transfer/bandwidth quota and how much my site has used?
Login to your CPanel and on the entry page, your transfer usage will be displayed. Your quotas are shown (although somewhat unlabeled) at the top of the information table, see example below.

What information is shown in the CPanel regarding Quotas?
Below is an example of quota information:

Disk usage                        1.33 Megabytes
SQL Disk usage                    0.00 Megabytes
Bandwidth usage (current month) 139.79 Megabytes
Disk space available             98.67 Megabytes

Note: add Disk usage + available to determine current quota.

But ... read on...

How can I find out which mailbox "dunnit" ?

The Cpanel DiskUsage feature summarizes the disk storage your account has used on the server - this includes all the web files you've uploaded, and especially email that's left on the server.

To debug where your space has gone, start by clicking on the DiskUsage icon in your cpanel:

This will bring you to your disk usage summary, which might look like:

Choose the high numbers you don't understand in the "Space Used" column and click on the subdirectory name to drill down to the next directory level:

The above example shows where the problem is: email box "sales" has a HUGE amount of messages left on the server.

Example email warning messages (if you've set up your Cpanel CONTACT email address)

Disk space usage is near the alloted quota:
(See email tip above)

Bandwidth (traffic) usage is near alloted quota:

Quotas are checked approximately every 24 hours, and at that time if you were near your quota, an email would be sent to your Cpanel contact email address, or if none is signed in, it tries "admin".

Instructions for Outlook Express for "Leave Messages on Server"

Heckling the Server to check for New Emails

Our servers are tuned for efficient performance for you web and email needs. The servers will block your IP address if one sees the situation of installed mailreader apps "heckling" to check for email once or twice a minute. For instance if you have several Outlook apps checking for email once or twice a minute, then that can add up for loading up and slowing down the server performance. 

This does not happen (is not applicable) for webmail apps (such as Horde, Squirrel, Cube).

It's good to check your Outlook settings to see how often they are polling.
A good frequency is every 5-10 minutes - it's unlikely that you'd be able to be reading your email every minute of the day anyway.
You can always do a manual SEND/RECEIVE in between the scheduled automatic polls to check in the case that you're expecting something important.