An inode is a data structure that has information about a file in your cpanel account. One inode represents one file, folder, email or anything stored in your cpanel account. Thus, the number of inodes used is qual to the number of files, folders and emails in your cpanel account. Like all hosting companies, we implement inode limits on our shared hosting servers to ensure optimal performance of our servers. You can view our inode limits per package under Resource Usage section in our Acceptable Usage Policy. To better understand the implementation of inodes, we will answer the questions below:
1. Why does Truehost Cloud implement inode limits?
There are two reasons why we implement inode limits on each cpanel account on our shared hosting servers:
- Extremely high inode counts can cause downtime during file system checks. Having users with too many inodes means the system will take a lot of resources during file system check, which causes load and thus downtime.
- Large number of files slows down the server considerably.
2. How do I check my inode count?
We have enabled inode usage display in the cpanel to help you know when you are about to hit your inode limit and act. To view inode count, login to your cPanel then on your right, under Statistics section look for File Usage or Inodes.
3. What is soft inode limit and hard inode limit?
Soft inode limit is the number of files you are allowed to have in your cpanel, depending on your package. The hard limit is the maximum possible number of files that can be contained in the cpanel.
4. What happens when I hit my Inode limit?
When you reach the soft inode limit, you can still upload files to your cpanel. When you reach the hard limit, you have reached the maximum possible file count limit and thus, you will not be able to upload files to the cpanel. You will also be unable to perform most actions on files in your cpanel such as creating files, installing new SSL certificates, editing files, deleting files to the trash bin (you will need to delete them permanently instead of sending to trash). You will also not be able to receive emails, your senders will get a bounce back message that their mail couldn’t be delivered because the recipients quota is full. Also, you will not be able to open most features in the cPanel such as phpMyAdmin, email clients such as Roundcube and Softaculous App Installer.
5. What do I do if am hitting my inode limit?
If you reach your inode limit or are almost reaching it, you will need to clear up some files in the cPanel. Some steps you can use to clear files are as follows:
- Delete all unnecessary files in your cpanel. This may include test sites that you created, say on a subdomain but did not delete them after finishing. For CMS like WordPress or Joomla, these files may include themes/plugins you have installed but not activated. As only one theme is used at a time, its best to have only one or two themes installed for your WordPress site. Any files you don’t use any more do not need to be in your cpanel.
- Delete old and spam emails. If you created emails and are no longer using them, you may delete them to free space in the cpanel. If you think they may still be important, consider downloading a backup of the emails to your local storage or sync them with an email client like Gmail, Outlook or Thunderbird and have all emails copied to your email client. Then purge the unused email to free up inodes. Also, purge all emails in junk folder and in trash folder as they consume your inodes.
- Disable the default address. When a cPanel account is created, an email whose name is same as the cpanel account username is also created. All email to your domain with invalid email address may be configured to be forwarded to this system email. You may choose to disable this forwarding and select Discard option for the email to save inodes. Check this article on how to disable default address from the cpanel.
If after performing these acts you still can’t get your inode limit low enough, you will need to upgrade your package to a higher package that allows for more inodes. Please contact our sales team to help you on which package will be best for you.
6. How do I prevent my limit from being reached quickly.
So as not to hit your limits fast, we recommend you avoid having unnecessary files in the cpanel. This can be achieved by applying the following:
- If you use a CMS like WordPress for your website, do not install themes and plugins you do not intend o use. Seach theme or plugin installation comes with many files. Only install themes and plugins that you need as this saves on inodes and also, improves your sites load speed.
- You need to safe guard your email credentials to avoid leaking them to parties that may attempt to use your account to relay spam. Spam email is also saved on your cPanel and thus consumes inodes.
- Lastly, avoid cron jobs that create so many files while running. If you must have such a cron job, please create another cron job to delete files generated by previous crons after they have done their job.
7. How does Truehost inode allotment compare with other hosting companies?
Our inode allotment is among the best in the industry. The table below compares inode limits of various global hosting companies with those of Truehost Cloud. Some hosting companies only have one limit, which is the hard limit.
Hosting Company | Package Name | Soft Limit | Hard Limit |
Truehost Cloud | Silver | 150000 | 200000 |
Gold | 300000 | 400000 | |
Platinum | 450000 | 600000 | |
GoDaddy | All Packages | 250000 | |
HostGator | All Packages | 100000 | 250000 |
HostPapa | Starter | 150000 | |
Business | 300000 | ||
Business Pro | 450000 | ||
Namecheap | Stellar | 300000 | |
Stellar Plus | 300000 | ||
Stellar Business | 600000 | ||
Bluehost | Standard Hosting | 50000 | 200000 |
Pro Hosting | 50000 | 300000 | |
A2 Hosting | All Packages | 600000 | |
iPage | All Packages | 200000 | |
SiteGround | StartUp | 150000 | |
GrowBig | 300000 | ||
GoGeek | 450000 |
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