[Solved] Disk Quota Exceeded

Disk Quota Exceeded is very scary and common linux error in web hosting servers. When this happen you as a website owner may fail to restart mysql database, fail to upload file or even failed to restart your web server if it is down.


Generally it looks like you exceeded your alloted disk limit or your overall disk space is full as the error message is very obvious (Disk Quota Exceeded) meaning you reached the limit of your disk quota assigned to you.. Due to which various services like MySQL database and web server can’t start as they need to create files for their proper functioning. We at CyberHosting use CyberPanel control panel, if you are using CyberPanel you can easily see disk space usage on your dashboard after your login.


We recommend CyberPanel for self-managed VPS as well, because it helps you to manage most of the things within few minutes, otherwise you could be spending lots of time doing the same thing. You can start using CyberPanel for free with just one install command, for more details visit the installation page.

Why you see Disk Quota Exceeded error?


If you are a website owner, and running a managed or self-managed VPS. There are 99% chances that you must have configured some sorts of backups and logging as well (logs generated by different application, to debug any issue in case something funny happens later). So there are some example of files that could be using extensive disk space and you don’t know about them:


  • Large old backup files residing on the server that you have not deleted.
  • Large log files from web server or any other applications that you have not deleted after they are rotated by the application.
  • Some un-used applications or staging setups that you did during developent.
  • Spam or deleted mail folders still containing large amount of emails that you don’t know off.


All these files could occpuy large amount of space ending up causing disk quota exceeded error.

Lets first find out large directories and files


We will first try to find out large files and directies in your server, you can then decide if those files  are safe to be deleted, ending up giving you more space.


cd /home

du -hs * | sort -rh | head -20


These command will print out large files and directories under /home directory of your server. You can then figure out what directories can possibly contain files that are not needed. Similary you can run this command under various directories such as /var/log


Make sure you don’t something which is important, and if you don’t know what you are doing, then it is better you let our experts do the work by hiring our managed vps or monthly support package we offer 3 days free trial (no credit card required).


If using CyberPanel


As mentioned above we recommend CyberPanel for managing your day to day server tasks, so if you have already  decided to use CyberPanel. Look for following directories as they must be containg large backup files that you won’t need.





Exceeded number of inodes (file entries) supported by your choosen file system


There is a possibility that you still have enough disk space left, but you reached inodes limit end up giving disk quota exceeded. First make sure you that you have enough space left.


Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1 25G 6.9G 19G 28% /


You can see that disk space is only 28% used. Now check if you reached inodes limit.


df -i

Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/vzfs 2000000 2000000 0 100% /

Now this means you have reached 100% of your inode usage. It is time that you delete smaller files that are no use to your applications. For example find large number of small files under /var


find /var -type d -size +256k


Similaly you can find small files under /home as well, and delete files to resolve disk quota exceeded error. Some type of files that you can easily delete are:


  1. Cache files generated by servers (LiteSpeed Server use disk for cache). Incase of LiteSpeed cache folder is created under home of each user.
  2. Sessions files generated under /tmp and not being deleted.
  3. Catch all email inbox may have 1000s of emails you don’t need to keep, so they can be easily discarded.


Easy way to clear some space if you are using CyberPanel


As adviced by us, if you are now using CyberPanel, there are some easy way to free up disk space safely.


Remove OpenLiteSpeed Cache folder


rm -rf /usr/local/lsws/cachedata


Remove Cache folders when using LiteSpeed Enterprise


rm -rf /home/domain.com/lscache


You can do this for every domain. (By replacing domain.com with your domain)


Delete Backups


rm -rf /home/domain.com/backup/*.tar.gz




You can also do


rm -rf /home/backup/*


Remove old CyberPanel versions


rm -rf /usr/local/*.tar.gz



We’ve discussed many reasons and their fixes related to disk quota exceeded error.  If you are still stuck at some point and don’t have much time or expertise to fix this issue, you can contact us to get help.


Sometimes it may just be a limitation imposed by any control panel you are using, and you could be losing important business emails due to this. So while you are fixing and debugging the cause, it is better to increase disk limit size for your accounts or mailboxes, so that you won’t lose important stuff.