Where your space goes

Your account is nearly full and you have no idea what is doing it. That is one of the most common hosting questions there is, and the answer is almost never what you expect: it is rarely your photos, and almost always a four-year-old mailbo

Written for: Customer, Reseller, Administrator

The Where your space goes screen shows that at a glance, with a button next to every item so you can act on it.

Where to find it

Click Accounts in the sidebar and pick your account (if you have only one, you land on it directly).
Under Usage, look at the Disk bar. Below it is a link: Where does my space go?
Click it.

You can also go there straight away. The web address is /accounts/<your-account>/usage, so you can bookmark it or send the link to somebody who is helping you.

What you see

Four figures at the top:

Measured on disk — what last night's measurement added up to.
Files — how many files (inodes) you have. See below for why that is a limit of its own.
E-mail — what all your mailboxes take together.
Databases — what all your databases take together.

Under those is the treemap: the bigger the tile, the more space that folder takes. Each colour is a kind of thing — websites, e-mail, your own backups, other — and the legend under it says which is which. Click a tile and you land in the file manager, in exactly that folder.

Then three lists, largest first every time:

Largest mailboxes — click one and you land on the mail screen for that domain, where you can empty the mailbox or change its quota.
Largest databases — click one and you land on that database's page, where you can tidy it up (Optimise) or export it.
Most files — click one and you land in the file manager in that folder.

Under the treemap there is Show table. It holds the same figures as text, which is handy for copying or for reading aloud.

Why the figures are from last night

The top of the screen always says when it was measured — As of 13-08-2026, 03:04, for instance. That is a choice, not an oversight.

To know how much each folder takes, the server has to visit every file in your account. On an ordinary account that is two hundred thousand of them easily. It costs the server real work, and if it did that the moment somebody opened this screen, your website would get slower because your neighbour was looking at their disk usage.

So the measurement runs at night, in the server's maintenance window (03:00 to 05:00 by default). Nothing is walked during the day — this screen only reads last night's answer.

The bar on your account overview is a different number and it does stay current: it comes from the filesystem itself and is refreshed every five minutes. In short:

How full am I? → the bar on your account overview, live.
What is filling it? → this screen, as of last night.

Measure now

If you have just cleared eight gigabytes and want to watch it go, click Measure now at the top right. The server takes the measurement immediately.

That is allowed once an hour per account. Click again inside that hour and you get the existing answer plus a note saying how many minutes are left — not an error, because nothing went wrong.

It works from the command line too:

$ corectl usage breakdown --account web1
web1 — 17.1 GB over 214882 files, measured 2026-08-13 03:04 UTC (ok)

LARGEST FOLDERS
      7.3 GB     84120 files  domains/test100.nl
      4.2 GB     62408 files  imap/test100.nl
      2.8 GB        42 files  backups

$ corectl usage refresh --account web1

Files are a separate limit

A hosting account can fill up in two ways, and the second one surprises almost everybody: you can run out of files while you still have gigabytes to spare. Every file takes a slot in the server's file table (an inode), whether it holds a gigabyte or nothing at all.

In practice it is always one folder doing it: a PHP session directory with tens of thousands of tiny files, a cache that is never cleared, or a folder of thousands of log files. That is why the Most files list is on this screen — it points straight at that folder.

If what you see there is a cache or session folder, you can usually empty it: the software recreates it. If you are not sure, ask your hosting provider before you delete anything.

When nothing has been measured yet

If it says No measurement yet, this account is new, or the server has not had a night since this feature arrived. You can wait until tonight, or click Measure now straight away.

If it says This answer is over a day old, the server was off for a night or the maintenance window was too short. The figures still hold, they are simply old — the date is right there, and Measure now takes a fresh one.