Before deciding whether to upgrade your hosting plan, it's worth checking exactly where your current resources are going. cPanel's Metrics section makes this easy to see at a glance.
1. Open Disk Usage
From cPanel's home screen, click Disk Usage under Files. It breaks down your storage by folder — email, databases, public_html, and backups — so you can see what's actually taking up space.
2. Find your biggest folders
The visual bar chart in Disk Usage sorts folders from largest to smallest. Old backup files and an oversized uploads folder are the most common culprits behind unexpectedly high usage.
3. Open Bandwidth
Under Metrics, click Bandwidth to see how much data your site has transferred over recent months, broken down by HTTP, email, and FTP traffic.
4. Spot a traffic spike
A sudden jump in bandwidth for a month with no unusual visitor growth can point to something else entirely, like a misbehaving script or a bot repeatedly hitting a large file.
Key takeaway: Check Disk Usage and Bandwidth together before upgrading your plan — sometimes clearing out old backups or compressing images solves the problem for free.
5. Use Visitors and Awstats for context
Under Metrics, Visitors and Awstats show which pages are driving the bandwidth you're seeing, helping you decide if the usage reflects genuine growth worth investing in.
6. Clean up before upgrading
Delete old backup files, compress large images, and remove any unused plugins or themes before assuming you need a bigger plan — this alone often buys you significant headroom.
7. When it's time to upgrade
If your Disk Usage and Bandwidth are both consistently near their limit after cleanup, and traffic is growing month over month, that's a solid sign to move up to the next Vikalink hosting tier.