5 Jan 2006 ... Website Disk Usage

I had to go renew my domain the other day, static8.com is now mine for another two years. And I decided to check in with my web host as well. Dreamhost. They are the coolest.

On the web panel, there are places where you can check how much bandwidth and disk space your web site is using up. I use less than 0.2gig of bandwidth each month... Static8 serves up many hundreds of html pages each day (between 200 and 1900 to humans and robots) but text doesn't weigh much and I've cut off the damned hotlinkers, so that helps tremendously.

When I checked my disk usage, tho, I started freaking out. I usually average around 17 and 18 megs... And the panel showed that in the last two weeks, my usage has creeped up to 28megs. That's 10 extra megs, unaccounted for, because also in the last two weeks my computer died and I haven't uploaded anything that huge to my site!

Panic. 10 extra megs, where is it coming from, why is it slowly growing?? Did I upload a virus to my site and it's propagating itself? Or, is that including my email space as well, a problem because I can't get online and delete it every day? But 10megs is a crapload of spam... I don't get _That_Much_ spam every day, do I??

A quick look through the knowledge base, and I couldn't figure out if the disk usage includes email or not. So, I emailed tech support. They're cool, you know, and they got back at me in 7 hours. And they told me it does include email, and I've got 13megs stored in my email.

hm. 13megs of email? I went to my email, deleted the usual amount of spam and thought, This is not 13megs. Since my computer died, I've been using webmail to read my mail on other computers, and I'm not entirely familiar with the software. So I looked around.

And noticed a "Trash" folder. Clicked on it.

And saw 622 spam and virus emails from the past two weeks. *laugh* So, the "delete" button in webmail only moves messages to the trash folder, it doesn't actually get rid of them. haha.

622. I am so silly.