This FAQ is designed to help you understand the issues related to file ownership and its affects on your disk quota. How and why certain files appear as they do when uploaded and how microsoft Front-page alters the ownership of files. Lastly this FAQ will focus upon how the POP3 accounts function and their relative affect on disk quota.

    Let me first begin by explaining how ownership of files work using an FTP client to upload these files. If you are using an FTP client to upload files you will be the owner of these files. Thus the files will show up against your disk quota.  This holds true even if you as the main account holder are uploading files for a sub account. It is imperative to remember this fact.
    So as an example let us consider the following case where the main account holder has the sole FTP access and  uses this facility to upload files to one of the sub accounts that he owns. When he uploads a file of  1 MB to his sub account, he notices that there is no change in the disk quota usage of the sub account , however his main account's disk usage has gone up by 1 MB. This is obviously due to the fact that the main account is the owner of the file and thus the server recognizes it as such. The end result being that the file size counts against the main account holder's disk quota.
    This is exactly why even though the main account might have only a few files uploaded,  its overall disk usage might show up as a bigger figure than its actual consumption of disk space. At the same time the sub accounts disk usage would show up as relatively small.
    The solution to the above problem is therefore obvious. The main account must therefore be allocated more disk space if it is has the sole FTP access into the site. The disk quota of the sub accounts can thus be minimized. However this brings our discussion to an important and very pertinent point, regarding  the POP3 accounts that are allocated to receive mail at the sub account.
    If the disk quota of the sub accounts is reduced to a extremely low value then the email received by the POP3 accounts for that account might experience some problems related to the fact that they might not have enough disk space to hold the emails that are being sent to them. In this case a .stage file is generated, for more information on the .stage file please take a look at our FAQ on the .stage file at The .stage file .

    Lastly we need to take a look at how Front-Page publishes to a website and what affects it has on the ownership of the files. If you are using FP98 or higher to publish to the website you need to read the following information.
    Frontpage publishes to a local site as it being the owner. Thus if you as the main account holder were using your username and password to publish to a sub account through front page then the sub account will be the owner of those files. The files will not show up on the disk quota of the main account. They will be owned by the sub account and will affect only that account's disk usage. This is therefore quite different from the an FTP client which functions as described  above.

Hopefully this information has helped you in answering any questions that you might have in regards to File ownership and Disk usage. If you have any further questions please email us at help@megaton.net