I used the same host for a number of years. At one point I had about 7 domains (and thus accounts) with them.

One of these accounts finally got a good amount of traffic. I was well within my bandwidth reqs, and the site itself only used maybe 50 megs of space.

The problems started when my log files were getting up to over 200 megs at the end of the month.

They counted this toward my drive space, even though I had no control over them. I could not delete them, compress them, or download them.

I'm just curious if this is the norm.

It depends on the control panel they use. For example, Cobalt control panels do not. Ensim control panels do. In my opinion, yes, they should. Those are your logs, they should take up your allotment. Most places will offer some way for you to delete logs or clear them since they do count.

Sounds like Compila.com...

If it is, get your money back now, they tryed charging me for 2000 big ones for people downloading some massive file which magically appeared on my site.

They would not delete log files on my host for me either. And also...when i first bought the site, i uploaded a few pages and my disk quota was full...i had 150MB, so i went into log files, and there was logs i hadn't even seen before, and i didnt make the actions on the file.

Its a load of ****, if you are with Compila, get out now!

well i'm mostly no longer with the company...

I don't know what control panel they were using, it was a windows box.

I moved my forums off that server and onto another. So all of the ASP is still there, but the forums are at forums.xxxxx.com

Since the forums consist of most of the trafic the logs are no longer a problem. All of the non ASP sites are gone from that company.

As soon as i can get the ASP converted to PHP that domain will be gone as well.

Thanks for the replies...

Originally posted by Shin
counted this toward my drive space, even though I had no control over them. I could not delete them, compress them, or download them.

I'm just curious if this is the norm. It's not really out of the ordinary for them to count toward your diskspace, but generally if they do they are saved in your user directory and so you should have access to them. Are you sure that you don't?

Many hosts will, even under that setup, run a routine that will rotate, compress, and/or delete the files.

Just to clarify: Cobalt logs (RaQ 4+, RaQ XTR) DO count against your space even though as a website administrator you cannot delete them without a custom administrative script.

-Matt

Just to clarify: Cobalt logs (RaQ 4+, RaQ XTR) DO count against your space even though as a website administrator you cannot delete them without a custom administrative script.

yeah, good point. Cobalt just does a better job with them, like gzip and storage to where it hardly becomes an issue. Ensim is plain text, so it fills so much space faster.

Some hosts I've been with do not include log files as part of your storage as long as you don't ask for raw logs and just accept their calculator tool (like Analog or webtrends, etc)

Other hosts who try to find reasons to charge you for extra traffic always include extra things like ftp traffic, email traffic, log traffic, mail checks, even control panel logins.

It is important to find out before you sign up. Although, sometimes the sales staff never know answers to these types of questions though.

Just out of interest why would you deem FTP and Email traffic as extra charges? They should most deinfately be charged for, usually out of your data transfer limit - it certainly isn't extra traffic.

Think about it, you're running a host, you don't charge for FTP traffic, you get a customer that comes along who uses FTP to provide files to visitors, they use 30Gb per month but don't get charged for it, so they tell their friends, suddenly you end up with 50 customers using 30Gb each and you're seriously out of pocket because you didn't charge - not good business practice really is it? Same goes for Email traffic and people sending email lists.

Hello
Ensim puts the logs in the users directories.
We had so many problems with this we set a cron to delete thyem every 24 hours.
If a customer requests access to the logs we write them to a different directory.

Cpanel keeps them in another directory but they can be downloaded if required.
This is a better arrangement.

Gordon

HSphere keeps 7 days worth gzipped in the users home directory.

The logs should be counted against the users space allocation as they are there for the benefit of the user.

However - system admins should use logrotate to gzip and archive the files. we keep seven days worth with 1MB each - this is reasonable as it then only grows to a max of a few megs gzipped.