If you’ve had WordPress hosting for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve ran across the Inode Limit inside your cPanel:
Sometimes this can be alarming to newcomers who don’t understand what it is.
We have an article in our knowledgebase that actually explains the technical terms of an Inode:
An inode is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a filesystem object such as a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the object’s data. Filesystem object attributes may include metadata (times of last change, access, modification), as well as owner and permission data. Directories are lists of names assigned to inodes. A directory contains an entry for itself, its parent, and each of its children.
Look At Inodes Like Individual Files
So basically, 1 file (such as a PHP page, email, image, etc.) is equal to 1 Inode.
If you notice, all of our WordPress hosting packages offer unlimited disk usage, but contain a limit on the number of Inodes per account:
You’ll notice when you hover over the information icon beside disk usage it shows two Inode limits; the first is the soft, the second is the hard.
The above example is for the Starter Cloud package: 100,000/250,000 Inode limit.
This means you can technically have up to 250,000 Inodes before the account needs to be upgraded, but once you reach the 100,000 limit, you should work on reducing the number of files on your account.
What Uses The Most Inodes?
Nine times out of ten when a user runs into these limits it’s because they’re not regularly clearing their email inboxes or they’re trying to host too many websites in one cPanel.
Spam folders for example can quickly fill-up with a lot of junk. Inside of cPanel you can actually set these to automatically delete after 30 days. This is actually how Gmail functions and is certainly recommended.
You’ll also notice two of the packages above have limits on the number of websites you can host in each account with the other two being unlimited. However, if you plan on hosting more than 15 – 20 websites, you would be much better off getting a Reseller Account.
Reseller accounts allow you the ability to create unlimited cPanel accounts, each with 100,000/250,000 Indoe limits respectively.
Complimentary Backups Only For 100,000 Inodes
In order for us to maintain a high-speed cloud infrastructure we have to place some type of limit when doing our complimentary nightly backups.
After much testing, we’ve set the cut-off at 100,000 Inodes OR 20GB in overall disk usage. If you reach either of those limits, your cPanel won’t be included in the complimentary nightly backups.
Simply put, this would put too much strain on the Solid State Drives and would cause a degrade in performance. That’s why we offer an additional backup solution, DropMySite.
How Many Inodes Does My WordPress Website Use
On average, a WordPress website with around 20+ pages of content uses around 15,000 – 20,000 Inodes, hence very well within the limit.
The majority of our customers never run into an issue, and if they do, it’s for one of the reasons mentioned above.
I’ve filmed a video tutorial that goes a bit more detail into Inode limits and how they affect your WordPress Hosting:
If you have any questions or concerns about the limits on your account, please feel free to comment below our reach out to our team!
Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.
OMG… Thank you for this amazingly clear explanation!
You’re most welcome!