For a while, the reikaxubia.com website had a recurring and frustrating problem: it kept crashing. Every one to two weeks, the site would go down, and I'd have to manually intervene to get it back up. It was unpredictable enough to be annoying but frequent enough that I knew something was fundamentally wrong.
Investigating the Cause
I started looking into WordPress health alerts to see if there were any clues. The WordPress Site Health screen flagged several warnings, but one stood out immediately: the server had less than 20MB of disk space remaining.
That was the culprit. The server was running out of space, and when it did, WordPress couldn't write temporary files, update caches, or perform other routine operations. The whole site would grind to a halt.
Why This Hadn't Been a Problem Before
I've run WordPress installations before, and disk space was never an issue. The difference with the reikaxubia.com site was the volume of image files. This website had numerous large image files — screenshots, promotional art, game assets for blog posts, and more. Unlike previous WordPress sites I'd managed, this one was image-heavy, and all of those files were being stored directly on the EC2 server's limited disk.
The Solution
The fix was to move all images off the server and onto external storage. I migrated every image file (except the favicon) to an Amazon S3 bucket. S3 provides effectively unlimited storage at a low cost, and it's designed specifically for serving static assets like images.
After uploading all the images to S3, I updated every reference throughout the WordPress site — blog posts, pages, media library entries — to point to the new S3 URLs instead of the local file paths. It took a bit of time to go through everything, but the process was straightforward.
The Result
The impact was immediate. The server's disk usage dropped significantly, giving WordPress plenty of room to operate. I've never had issues with the website going down since!
It's one of those problems that seems obvious in hindsight. If your server has limited disk space, don't store large media files on it. But when you've never had the problem before, it's easy to overlook until it starts causing real issues.