How You Can Easily Conserve Disk Space On Your Server

(Mon Jun 28th, 2010, by Marcus Lim)

So many people do not think about conserving disk space on their server until things are starting to get a little backed up. The sooner you address this issue, hopefully before it actually becomes an issue, the better. Most people do not think of such a thing being an issue when the look for web hosting or when they go for domain registration. If you have found yourself in a position where you need to start conversing some space but you are unable to change your web hosting, there are some things that you can do.

Sometimes, it is the simple things that add up to be a lot. You will want to start going through your images and your files and compress them. You want to make the file sizes as small as possible. For each file you compress, you are not saving all that much space, but consider if you are compressing a thousand files. It all adds up, especially since you will take other steps as well for conserving space.

Reducing the amount of the graphics that you are using can be difficult, especially if you are not one for a lot of change. The thing is though, there are other ways to showcase or display the information you are trying to get out there. Use a nice and simple HTML line instead of a major graphical divider. This will save you a good bit of space on your server. Web hosting will start to get a little easier for you.

Take your images and remove them from the server. Instead, you will want to use free image hosting sites. A popular one would be Photobucket. You will load your images to the free hosting site and you can link them to your page. There may be certain bandwidth limits that you will have to watch for, but this is a great option for many people.

Get rid of the old stuff. This is something that sounds too simple to work. But while you are busy with things such as domain registration, you want to make sure that you are not forgetting the super easy stuff to do. Every so often, you will want to go through your older files and purge the ones that you no longer need. You might not think that you have a lot of such files, but once you really start digging in there to see what you really have, you just might find yourself a little surprised. You can free up a lot of space this way. This is how so many people get away with easy web hosting with little space problems. They have weekly, monthly or twice yearly purging of old documents.

Another simple step to do would be to be extra careful when deciding what to store on your server. Some people will store anything and everything, just in case. This is not a wise idea. Unless you can't live without it or your page will not survive without it, you may want to rethink where you are storing it. Like mentioned before, Photobucket is a great online place for all of your images. Google docs is a great place for files and documents that do not need to take up space on your server, but that you are not comfortable letting go of just yet. You could also copy everything to disk if that makes you feel more comfortable.

As you can clearly see, there are many things that you can do for your web hosting, for the space on your server. You just need to get started. Start with the simple stuff. As you start to see just how much space you are really able to clear up, you will get more excited about it and you will start going wild. Before you know it, you will have more than enough space and you will be able to carry on with your web hosting as always. You might even be up for another domain registration after all of this. Do make sure that you are tackling this job on a day you can really dedicate some time to it. This way, you will really delete what needs to go and you will not get rid of some precious files by accident.