Editing an Account

An account is not fixed at the numbers it was sold. A customer upgrades, a plan changes, an owner’s email was mistyped. Accounts → the account → Overview → Edit account changes all of it in one step.

What you can change:

Limits	Disk quota, monthly bandwidth, mailboxes, MySQL databases, FTP accounts, domain aliases, addon domains, subdomains, applications
Hosting package	Apply a package (its limits become the account’s), or detach from it
Owner details	Owner name, owner email, description

The primary domain and the PHP version are not editable — they are fixed for the life of the account. Passwords are changed from the account’s Access section, not here.

A limit of 0 means unlimited

Everywhere in CorePanel, 0 is not “none” — it is “no limit”. An account with 0 mailboxes can create as many as it wants. This is the same convention used when creating an account and when defining a hosting package.

Applications are the exception

The Applications limit reads the other way round: 0 means the account may not run applications at all, and there is no value meaning unlimited. An application is a long-running program with its own memory and network namespace, so it is granted deliberately, by naming a number. The field says so underneath it in the editor.

Accounts created before this rule carry 0 and therefore run no new applications; raising the number is all it takes. Applications already running are left alone — lowering the limit below them is refused like any other undersized limit.

Each field in the editor shows what the account currently uses underneath it, so you can see the headroom you are giving or taking away before saving.

Limits below current usage are refused

You cannot set a limit below what the account already holds. An account with 12 mailboxes does not accept a limit of 5, and the panel says so on the field itself as you type:

The account already uses 12. Lowering the limit below that is not possible.

This is deliberate. The alternative would be for CorePanel to delete a customer’s mailboxes, databases or domains to make the account fit the new number, and no control panel should ever do that quietly. Free the resources first, then lower the limit.

The refusal is enforced by the server, not just by the form: the whole edit is rejected and nothing is written, so a form with one bad field never applies the other fields halfway. The error names every resource that is in the way, not just the first one.

Counted against reality, not a stored number

When you open the editor, CorePanel counts what the account actually holds — mailboxes, databases, FTP accounts, aliases, addon domains, subdomains, applications — rather than trusting a stored counter. Saving also writes those counts back, so the figures shown in the panel are corrected as a side effect of any edit.

The disk quota is the one exception

Disk space works differently, because the kernel accepts a user being over their limit: that is what the quota grace period exists for. Lowering an account’s disk quota below what it currently stores is therefore possible — but only on purpose.

Type a quota smaller than current usage and the panel refuses it like any other limit, plus a checkbox:

This quota is below the 1536 MB the account already stores. Apply it anyway. The account goes over quota immediately: it can still be read, but not written to until it is back under the limit.

Use it for a real plan downgrade or right after a migration, and tell the customer. Do not use it to “make room” in a hurry.

What “over quota” actually does, and for how long

CorePanel does not write one limit per account but two, and the difference decides whether the account keeps working:

Soft limit	The quota you sold. This is the number shown everywhere in the panel.
Hard limit	Soft + 5 %, with a floor of 50 MB and never more than double the soft limit.

Between the two, the account is over its allowance but still writing, for as long as the grace period lasts. Past the hard limit, every write is refused immediately — there is no grace period above it.

This matters for a forced downgrade, because that is usually the case you land in. An account storing 1536 MB that you cap at 1024 MB has a hard limit of 1075 MB, so it is already above it: writes stop the moment you save, not a week later.

The grace period is 7 days by default, and CorePanel does not set it. It belongs to the filesystem’s quota configuration, so the default is whatever ext4 or XFS ships — 7 days for both. Inspect or change it per filesystem on the server:

# ext4 — show and set the block grace period
setquota -t /home
setquota -t 604800 604800 /home     # 7 days, in seconds

# XFS
xfs_quota -x -c 'timer -u 7days' /home

When the grace period expires with the account still above the soft limit, the soft limit starts behaving like a hard one: writes are refused from then on, exactly as if the hard limit had been crossed.

Once writes are refused, the failures are spread out and rarely look like a disk problem: uploads fail, PHP cannot write session files, cron jobs produce half-written output, and mail to existing mailboxes bounces because Dovecot cannot deliver it. Reading is unaffected — the site keeps serving and the existing mail is still there.

The account recovers by getting back under the soft limit: free up space and writes resume, with the grace timer reset. Raising the quota again has the same effect.

There is no equivalent for counted resources

Forcing applies to the disk quota alone. No option, in the panel or the CLI, sets a mailbox or database limit below what the account holds. A disk quota can be exceeded and then walked back; a mailbox over its limit would have to be deleted, and CorePanel will not do that.

Applying a hosting package

Choosing a package in the editor re-applies it: the package’s limits become the account’s limits, replacing whatever was there. The individual limit fields switch to the package’s values and are locked while it is selected, so you see exactly what is about to be stored — including whether the package is too small for what the account already holds, which is refused just like a hand-typed limit.

Choosing No package (custom limits) detaches the account from its package. Detaching changes nothing about the account’s limits — it only stops recording which package they came from.

Editing a limit by hand keeps the package

An account created from Business that you then edit by hand stays a Business account, shown as Business · customized. CorePanel keeps the link on purpose:

• you still know which plan the account was sold on;
• re-selecting the package puts the account back on the standard limits in one step;
• the accounts list can still be read by plan.

If you want the account to stop claiming a plan, detach it explicitly.

Editing a package does not change existing accounts

The relationship works one way. Changing a package’s limits does not push them to the accounts already created from it — see Hosting Packages. Apply the package again from this editor to bring one account back in line.

From the CLI

# Upgrade: more mailboxes and more disk
corepanel account update 7 --max-emails 100 --quota 20480

# Move the account onto a package, then override one of its limits
corepanel account update 7 --package 3 --max-subdomains 50

# Plan downgrade below what the account currently stores
corepanel account update 7 --quota 1024 --force

Only the flags you pass are changed; every other limit is left exactly as it is. Since 0 means unlimited, omitting a flag is not the same as passing it with 0 — a limit you do not mention is untouched, while --max-emails 0 grants unlimited mailboxes. --max-apps is the exception in both directions: --max-apps 0 revokes the application runtime, and --max-apps 5 is the only way to grant it.

Resolve an account id with corepanel account list. The full flag list is in the CLI reference.

When a quota is stored but not enforced

If the server is not enforcing disk quotas yet, a new quota is still stored and the panel warns that nothing is acting on it. The limit takes effect as soon as quotas are enabled — you do not have to re-enter it. See Resource limits.