Managing disk space is very important, as disk space is so limited, and it always seems to be in short supply, it must be managed properly. It isn’t exciting, but it is vital to the health and well being of your website.

First, you need to make sure that you have enough disk space. If you don’t have very many webpages, and you have no audio or video, this usually isn’t an issue. However, when you do have numerous webpages, databases, audio, and video, it can become an issue very quickly.

You have to learn to view the space on your web server the same way that you view space on your personal computer. Information is stored either on the hard drive, or in the memory. When the hard drive fills up, and disk space runs low, more of the memory is used, and the computer runs slower. This is also true with a server.

The order that information is stored on a system is random, even if it displays the information in order. There really is no rhyme or reason to it. It’s much like laying cards out in order. Eventually, as those cards are picked up and moved around, things are in disarray, and it may take the system longer to find the correct card.

With that in mind, when you no longer use a program on your computer, you know that it is ideal for the system that you remove that program. This frees up disk space, allowing the system to operate more efficiently. If you leave it there, it bogs the system down as more and more space is taken up on the hard drive.

However, as you remove programs, read only files and pieces of other programs get moved around, and they actually become harder for the system to find, even though the system finds that storing these bits of data are easier. While you can use disk defragmentation utilities to correct this problem on your computer system, you can’t use this utility on your web server.

The only way to maintain order on your web server is to physically make sure that files are arranged in some type of order, where they are easy to find – for both you and the server, as it tries to gather the bits and pieces of a webpage to send it to the browser for display.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t defragment the drive of your server. In most cases, you can make a request of the server administrator to do this, and they will do it. This is usually also part of their regular maintenance procedures as well.

So, to review, when it comes to managing disk space, there are three aspects that must be kept in mind. These include keeping enough disk space to store the files that you need to store, making sure that there is enough space on the disk for faster storage, and making sure that files stay in order, and the disk stays defragmented so that files can be retrieved faster by the system.

Again, this really isn’t an issue if you have few files on your server, but as your site grows, it will indeed become a big issue. Of course, managing disk space from the beginning is the key to smoother operation down the road.

HostGator Web Host provides hosting packages that include unlimited disk space.