Monthly catchup action
2026-05-28 11:24:45 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I‘m still trying to figure out exactly why the storage in my Github Actions has gone through it‘s monthly quota. Github support did get back in touch with me, but that got delayed because replying to the emails for some reason didn‘t add the message to the support case thread. I didn‘t realise initially so that wasted a few days. When I copied those messages into the thread, they replied with what looked like a pre-prepared reply with some links but not really answering my question.
I am genuinely confused by their storage quota. I have been using it for several years in the same exact way. Every day an action runs and builds the website if there was new content added, and during that build I create an artifact of the built website in order to pass it between two Github Action jobs. It‘s a pretty standard thing to do as far as I am aware. The artifact is around 100MB, and I set a retention policy of 1 day, which is the minimum amount. I don‘t even need the artifact to last a day, as soon as the build is finished it can be deleted as far as I am concerned.
Well Github have changed their billing system relatively recently, within the past few months, so I suspect it‘s got something to do with that, because I am literally using the least amount of actions storage as possible. The way it's always worked is as long as I was under the 500MB limit every day, and I always am because of the 1 day retention setting, then the quote is not exceeded.
But now when I look in the billing section they are talking about GB-hrs, and it lists 100s of GB-hrs. I have no idea what this means, but it just seems utterly ridiculous to me because I am as far as I am aware using the least amount of storage possible. I politely pointed this out to the support person, and they have gone dark on me. It's been several more days now and no reply. Anyway the billing cycle resets in 4 days.
I‘ve added a scheduled start to the build so that as well as building on push to main, it now builds once at the start of each month. That will hopefully ensure that any content I push during these weird periods were Github is blocking me for whatever reason they have decided to block me for this time, always makes it onto the website. #