A Tip for squeezing a little more free space from a VPS
KL Insight's Web Design VPS with Linode has been rock a solid solution over the last 4 years. It currently hosts multiple client sites and mail agent and all these sites and emails quickly eat up precious hard drive space; and with only 20GB the wall can be hit early.
The measly 20GB does comes with a kick ass IO rate that beats even some dedicated servers
Stop blabering and get to it
Linux logs everything, these logs grow overtime, systems run 'logrotate' to archive and delete old logs - the settings are very liberal and tweaking them could save gigabytes of space, 1.1GB in my instance. Modify your /etc/logrotate.conf as needed but the important bit is compressing by default and using bzip2 instead of gzip to do so.
# see "man logrotate" for details # rotate log files weekly weekly # keep x weeks worth of backlogs - default 4 rotate 2 # Archive log files by adding a YYYYMMDD instead of simply adding a number. dateext # create new (empty) log files after rotating old ones create # uncomment this if you want your log files compressed compress # use bzip2 which is higher compression the gzip used by default compresscmd /bin/bzip2 compressoptions -9 compressext .bz2 uncompresscmd /bin/bunzip2 # packages drop log rotation information into this directory include /etc/logrotate.d # no packages own wtmp, or btmp -- we'll rotate them here /var/log/wtmp { missingok monthly create 0664 root utmp rotate 1 } /var/log/btmp { missingok monthly create 0660 root utmp rotate 1 } # system-specific logs may be configured here
There are also specific application/services blog settings in the /etc/logrotate.d directory. Apache by default keeps it's logs for a lengthy 52 weeks! This can be changed by modifying the /etc/logrotate.d/apache2 file as shown below:
/var/log/apache2/*.log { weekly missingok # rotate 52 compress delaycompress notifempty create 640 root adm sharedscripts postrotate /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null endscript }
Be legendary and do social like this post as that helps me immensely.