What's Filling Up Your Web Hosting Space?

Many web site owners don’t make it a habit to check their disk space. Hey, I don’t do it on every single web site I have either. Maybe because disk space is so abundant and frankly, cheap these days. But if you do max out your web space, your site could be crippled especially if you have blogs with comments and forums where people enter data and gets saved to your site.

You normally don’t have to worry too much about that happening because most web hosts will send you a warning email when your site capacity reaches a certain level like 80% or more.

Some of us have big sites and that’s OK but if you don’t have a very active site, you don’t host a lot of multimedia files, where could all that web space go to?

Here are some other scenarios.

Forgotten mailbox. Your site is a mini site or opt-in page, you did set up email at one time but never checked it. Somehow or another this email address gets on a spammer’s list, or you have set up the email somewhere but simply forgot all about it.

Default mailbox. Most if not all web hosting accounts come with a default address. Some web hosts have this default address active and ready to receive emails. If your host does this and you don’t check it, sooner or later this address will fill up with emails because the default address is a ‘catch all’ address. It receives all emails that do not have a real user. For example, you set up yourname@domain.com but someone (usually spammers) send an email to admin@domain.com the default address catches and stores this. Before long, this inbox eats into your web hosting space. To ‘turn it off’, set the default address to fail or bounce. I prefer fail. If you don’t know how to do this, check with your web host.

Databases. Have a forum or blog that you rarely use or check in on? Spam comments filling it up? Well, deleting spam comments and spam posts reduces your web space too. Database counts as part of your web hosting space.

Backups. Check to see if you have any automatic backup scripts running that saves the backups to your web space. Download the backups to your computer and delete them so they don’t fill up your hosting. Also, if you ever do a backup through Cpanel, download and delete them too. That normally fills space quickly because the backups are like a duplicate of your site.

Next time you wonder where all that space went, check these common culprits. Use the disk space viewer feature in cpanel or your web host control panel to find out where the biggest files and folders are.

Beware of the Social Networking Trap

Social networking, though very popular today, can become a trap that can actually decrease your productivity and suck up hours of valuable work time.

So be careful!

A few of the more common culprits include Twitter, a micro-blogging tool which allows you to communicate with followers (friends) instantly. Another is Facebook, a social networking site that allows you to join a network by geographic location, create a profile and add friends. Of course we all know about the infamous MySpace as well.

There are also other social networking sites, all which are useful in their own right and do offer some valuable opportunities to network. But if you don??t value your time and approach your networking wisely, they can have a negative affect on your business.

If you are like most online business owners, it??s not uncommon to long for a connection with the outside world. These social networking sites offer this adult interaction making them like magnets we can??t seem to get away from. If we aren’t careful we can easily spend hours or in some cases, entire days chatting away with our new found friends. This comes at a cost to our business, Moms!

Instead of putting in valuable work time, that for many of us can sometimes be hard to come by, we waste it away chatting. It??s best to use these sites wisely, by scheduling into your day specific yet limited times to chat.

Just like other areas of our business, we must have a plan for networking too. Ask yourself, ??What is my purpose for joining and interacting on these types of sites??? Some people choose to use Twitter as a way of announcing new and exciting information about their business and keeping their customers abreast of what??s going on.

Others may use them for catching up with online friends and as a truly social connection. That??s perfectly fine. However, you??ve got to limit that time if you want to be productive in your business. A virtual water cooler is definitely a plus for us work at home mamas, but even in the real world, a boss wouldn??t let you sit in the break room all day long chatting it up with your co-workers. We shouldn??t allow ourselves to do it either.

Either way, use of these sites can be beneficial to business owners if used for the better of our business or our sanity. Always allow yourself as much focused worked time as possible each day and throw in a little chit-chat but don??t let your business suffer because of it. After all, we all know there will be plenty of distractions in our day without adding another one to the bunch.

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Find further tips, tools and ideas for marketing with the written word at www.Contentrix.com

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