Is permanently disabling disk quotas a bad idea?

[spaceman]

Hi All,

I note a previous, but quite old, thread discussing how to permanently disable disk quotas here: http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/permenently-disabling-disk-quotas-47845.html

My question: is it bad/risky to permanently disable disk quotas?

The reason I ask is this: if a hosting account exceeds it's disk storage limits, then we *DON'T* want the website hosting account to show errors or go down. That just pi55es the client off - even though they probably got warnings about running out of disk space. Instead, we want to make this a customer service opportunity, i.e. to invite the client to upgrade to a higher plan. (Even better might be for cPanel to auto-upgrade the client to a higher plan, but possibly getting ahead of myself now...)

Has anyone else permanently disabled disk quotas - presumably for the same reason? Any strong negatives that we should know about?

Thanks,

Ross.

 

[Kailash1]

If you do not want to count the quota, you can disable it but keep in mind that once you disable it, anyone can upload unlimited data on your server and you will not be able to check the disk usage directly. If this is a shared hosting server, disabling a quota is a bad idea.

 

[spaceman]

Thanks for your feedback.

Is there not a way to disable quotas, but still report on it? I mean, especially under suphp, wouldn't the owner of all files still be clearly identifiable (and reportable), even if "hard" quota restrictions aren't being enforced by the OS?

 

[Kailash1]

You can't check the disk usage in WHM if you turn off the quota.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

One alternative is to leave quotas enabled, and simply configure the packages for "Unlimited" disk space usage, or to a very high disk space quota. This too would allow a single account to use up the server's available space, but it would also report disk space usage that you could review manually via Web Host Manager.

Thank you.

 

[spaceman]

Thanks for your reply, Michael.

I'm thinking that your suggestion is the only one that guarantees (subject to there being spare space on the server as a whole) that websites won't crash because they exceed their package allowance.

The challenge as I see it is that you do still really want that reporting, i.e. reporting to clients that they're approaching their package limits. And you want that to be automatic, not manual.

So perfect world IMHO is where you leave quotas enabled, but then the package storage limits are soft limits not hard limits, i.e. they do not enforce quotas - just report on them. Am I making sense? Do you think my idea has legs?

Again, this is very much me coming from a high customer service perspective. If I was a hard-core tech-head (no disrespected indended... it takes all sorts) then my opinion would be "Tough! They were warned. They had the option to upgrade their account but chose not to. So what if their site went down? Serves them right".

 

[cPanelMichael]

It's important to note that reaching the disk space limit does not automatically suspend an account. It simply results in failed attempts when attempting to utilize more space for services such as email. The type of setup you are seeking is not currently supported. However, you are welcome to open a feature request for it via:

Submit A Feature Request

Thank you.

 

[spaceman]

It simply results in failed attempts when attempting to utilize more space for services such as email.

Yes, the reason this issue has flared up for us is that, for legacy reasons, some of our hosted sites are using tmp storage space within the hosting account storage quota, as opposed to the shared servers /tmp storage. So we're seeing a couple of sites throwing error messages (thereby disabling the site) when an attempt is made to grab temporary storage within the hosting account, but then having that request for temporary storage denied because of a hard quota limit.

So arguably the circumstances I've described are a little unusual, but the central principle remains: I want a system that doesn't automatically disable ANY aspect of a client's hosting account unless a human decision is made to do this.

But I take your point about this potentially being more of a WHMCS than a Cpanel thing.... so I've posted a feature request over here: https://requests.whmcs.com/responses/auto-upgrade-hosting-accounts

Thx.