When you sign up for a hosting subscription with us, depending on the offer you have signed up for, you will be allocated a disk space in one of our servers. This limited disk space is also called "quota".
The quota/disk space is therefore a limit that all your data and files stored on our servers cannot exceed. Your data consists of your website(s), your backups, your databases, e-mails, as well as any other files stored in your hosting space.
For example, if you have a MINI type of hosting, you have a disk space of 5GB. If you store your e-mails in our servers so that you can consult them from several devices (see What to choose between IMAP and POP?) and you have received about 1GB of e-mails, you only have 4GB available to store your site and possibly the associated database.
My disk space is not completely occupied and yet I can't receive any more e-mails?
It is important to note that if several e-mail accounts are used by several different people, it may be useful to define a quota per e-mail account. This means that accounts with this limit will not be able to receive e-mail if it is reached, even if there is still free disk space in your hosting.
However, the opposite is not always obvious: if your disk space is completely occupied (whether by other files, databases and/or other e-mail accounts), even if the quota of an e-mail account is not reached, it will still not be able to receive new e-mail. This will also be the case for any other e-mail account on your hosting.
In practice, if you are the only one using your account, we advise you not to set a quota for your e-mail accounts unless you know what you are doing. When you have several accounts of different people (companies, associations, etc...) it can be useful to limit the e-mail accounts via a quota to avoid that only one account can block all the others (by occupying all the disk space allocated to your hosting only with its e-mails).
If I reach the limit what happens?
First of all, it is important to know that you will receive automatic e-mails warning you that your account is or will soon be saturated. This is so that you can take the necessary measures in time and before any service is interrupted. It is your responsibility to read these automatic messages so that you can become aware of them in time.
Once your account is "full" (all your disk space is occupied), you simply cannot add any more data to your account. This usually results in the inability to receive new emails but also in other failures such as the inability to update your site or even errors. It is therefore very important for you to keep yourself informed of the occupation of your disk space and to monitor it carefully, particularly by reading the messages that are automatically sent to you by the system.
You will find in this other topic how to check as well as the solutions that are available to you if you ever occupy all the disk space (or come close to it) that is allocated to you as part of your offer: I don't receive e-mails anymore, what's going on?