In your control panel, you will see that your website is associated with a certain Hosting Volume. In some communication regarding outages, you will also see that there may be issues with certain hosting volumes.
This article will try to clarify what a Hosting Volume is, and what it does and doesn’t mean for an account.
What does a Hosting Volume do
Websites hosted on InfinityFree are running on a custom built cloud hosting platform. This cloud platform uses a network of servers for every website, balancing optimal performance and hardware for serving your website, storing it’s files, and running it’s database.
Every hosting account is assigned to a Hosting Volume. Simply put, each Hosting Volume is a cloud storage drive which hosts the files of the accounts assigned to it.
The web servers can access these cloud storage drives to retrieve the files of a particular web hosting account, so they can be shown on the website. The FTP servers also have access to these cloud storage drives, so you can upload files to the storage of your hosting account.
What a Hosting Volume is not
A Hosting Volume is not a fancy marketing term for a server. A Hosting Volume is not a server.
If a website is unreachable, the issue can rarely be attributed to the hosting volume. Usually, unreachable websites are caused by an issue on the web server. Web servers can be most easily identified by the IP address assigned to your account.
If you have an issue with your website, please specify the website URL or domain or account username. Don’t just specify the hosting volume. Chances are that the hosting volume is working fine, and that the issue is related to some other aspect of your account which cannot be traced to a hosting volume.
Accounts on the same Hosting Volume can be hosted on different IP addresses. And since the files of websites are not stored on the web server, accounts can be easily moved to other IP addresses, by simply accessing the Hosting Volume from another server.
Finally, not all content of a hosting account is stored on the hosting volume. Databases are not related to hosting volumes. Databases are hosted on different servers with different storage.
Where can I find my Hosting Volume
You can find the hosting volume of your account in the client area.
Go to Accounts, find your account and click Manage next to it. On that page is a card titled Account Details. In there, you will find your hosting volume.
What happens if my Hosting Volume is not working correctly
Your hosting volume holds your website files, so if the hosting volume doesn’t work, quite a few things will break.
On your website, you may see the following errors:
- Some kind of Connection Timed Out error (varies by browser)
- Some kind of Connection Refused error (varies by browser)
- A page saying “404! We couldn’t find that page.”.
When connecting to FTP, you may see errors like this:
- 421 Home directory not available
- A “Connection timed out” after a
PASS ****command.
If your account has errors from the website AND the FTP category, you can be pretty sure it is a hosting volume issue. But you may experience other issues too.
The file manager also uses FTP under the hood. So if FTP is not working, you may see errors like:
- Being redirected to a login screen.
- “Error! Could not read line from socket”
Some control panel features that interact with files will be broken too, such as:
- Softaculous
- Redirects
- Error pages