: What are Inode limits? My hosting company has the following limitation. There is a soft limit of 100,000 files per cPanel; however, accounts that exceed over 250,000 files will be in

@Si4351233

An inode limit is effectively a file count limit. Based on the quote from the terms you have provided it appears as though your host is Hostgator, if that is the case then the inode limit means the following for you...

The soft limit of 100'000 is a limit in the sense that once you have more than 100'000 files on your hosting account (across all domains and sub domains) then your site will no longer be included in the weekly backups. You can continue to upload files past this limit but there will be no backup maintained by Hostgator. This is not so much of an issue if you use cPanel's built in backup feature to download your backup archives regularly but if you don't then you need to be aware that backups won't be available after you have exceeded this file count.

The hard limit of 250'000 is a total limit in that if you exceed 250'000 files on your shared hosting account then your account may be flagged for review and/or suspension.

As for how to avoid exceeding this limit an average site suited for shared hosting should not come close to this file limit. Even very large application based sites with a ridiculously large number of library files and plugins still would be under 10'000 files (one Joomla installation I performed for a client with nearly 50 extensions and over 100 plugins reached an inode count of 15'000). cPanel has an inode count indicator on the control panel that you can check whenever you need. It is good to check this figure after a large site refactor or a large number of new files being uploaded, as well as regularly if your site uses file based caching or provides an option for end users to upload files to the site.

If you come close to hiting a 250'000 inode limit then chances are your site would be better suited to a VPS server instead of a shared server.

Vote Up Vote Down