Disk usage explained

Hard disc - disc usage Web servers, the machines that your account is stored on, all use disk space. The account that stores your email and website comes with a standard amount of disk space included for free. A Basic Hosting Account, for example, comes with 1Gb of free space.

If you see an item on your annual renewal invoice marked Disk Usage and a charge of £50 or multiples thereof, this page explains what this charge is and why you are seeing it on your renewal invoice.

Having said that, most of our customers will never have an excess disk usage charge. 1Gb (or 1024Mb) is more than ample for the vast majority of clients

How is my Disk Usage calculated?

The amount of disk space in use in excess of your free allocation is calculated by the server at the time of renewal billing. It includes all of the disk space used by:

your website (if you have one)
your email on the server (whether POP or IMAP)
your website logs (more website hits create larger logfiles)

The server then calculates the total disk space used and breaks this up into 100mb units. So:

a Basic Hosting Account gives you a 1Gb of free disk space
if your total disk usage comes to, say, 927mb, you will not be charged any extra (because it is under 1Gb)
if the total used comes to 1497mb, this is 473mb more than 1Gb
473mb fits into 2 x 250mb units - previously 5 x 100mb units - (rounded up or down as appropriate).
you would be charged 2 x £50 - previously 5 x £25 - over the course of the year from the time of your hosting renewal period. It is also charge pro-rata, quarterly in arrears. This means spreading your charge over the course of the year which should help you to budget for disk charges from now on.

This is a charge levied because of your use of your account. It is not negotiable or something you can choose not to pay. It is, however, not an ’over-use’ penalty and does not constitute in any way abuse of your account (subject to our standard terms and conditions). You are perfectly entitled to use as much space as you need on your account.

Once you start to use a great deal of disk space, disk usage is charged on a sliding scale (as are most things that are purchased in bulk):

Up to 25 units of 250mb is charged at £50 per unit
Between 26 and 30 units of 250mb is charged at £35 per unit
Between 31 and 40 units of 250mb is charged at £20 per unit
Between 41 and 50 units of 250mb is charged at £10 per unit
Over 50 units of 250mb is charged at £5 per unit

How can I minimise my Disk Usage charge?

Nobody should have to pay more than necessary. Therefore here are a number of steps you can take to minimise your bills:

make sure you are not using your webspace to store large numbers of images or documents that really shouldn’t be up there. Store them on your own hard disk and delete them from the server
if you are using POP for email, make sure the leave a copy on the server option is unchecked, and always backup the downloaded e-mail to your hard disk. Better still back it up to popular removeable media such as USB storage or DVD
if you are using IMAP for email, use your e-mail software’s local folders to store messages that are ’archive’ in nature, so that only those messages that are ’current’ remain on the server

For some people, especially those who travel, email is critical, as is their use of IMAP. For these people there is no real solution other than to pay the Disk Usage charge. However, if you are a serious business traveller we very much doubt that the equivalent of an additional £4.25 a month is going to be an issue!

A Final Reminder!

We are not responsible for your data. "Your data" includes your website if hosted on our servers, any database you have working in conjunction with your website, and all of your email (whether POP or IMAP) if you leave it on our servers.

Therefore, backing up your data up should be an essential part of your business strategy.

If you choose to delete those messages, files or folders that are taking up so much space on the server, remember to download them first to your hard disk (if they are not already there) and...

backup, backup, backup!

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