Web Hosting Company Inode Limits

Web hosting space is physical space on a hard disk.  It’s a volume measurement.  So how come some websites with unlimited web space still get shut down?  It’s because they’ve exceed their inode limit.

An inode stands for index node and it’s nothing more than a file, any file, ALL files.  Inodes are a total count of all your web pages, CSS files, emails, images, program files, database files, you name it.  If there’s a file, it goes into the inode count.

Let’s say your website is using 1MB of disk space.  To put that in perspective, that’s roughly 310 single-page Word documents in 12pt Times Roman font with no images.  If you have 1 file using 1MB, that’s 1 inode, but if you have 310 files using a total of 1MB of space, that’s 310 inodes.  If you host a lot of websites on a single hosting account, you can begin to see how it all adds up.

Web Hosting Company Inode Limits

To find out what the inode limit on a web hosting plan, you have to read the Terms of Service.  If not found, ask customer service.  I did some poking around and posted the information in the table below.

Hosting With NO Inode Limit

I was shocked to find NO inode limit in iPage‘s TOS, so I submitted a support ticket on September 19, 2011 and asked them.  They straight up told me, and I quote, “There is no Inode limit on our server.”  Seriously? That’s unheard of, so I did a little more digging and found a few more web hosting providers without inode limits like Arvixe Hosting and Cirtex Hosting.

Monitoring Inodes

One of the things that’s irked me for a long time is hosting companies with an inode limit (sometimes called file count), but they give you no way to check how many files your account is using and suspend your account when you go over the limit. I have a script that the SuperGreen help desk gave me that I run, but still. I recently purchased a BlueHost account and right there in the cPanel control panel on the left side is File Count. Take a look at the screen print on the right. Since I just signed up for an account and only have a few things going on at the moment, the count is still low. The count is not real-time. It appears to be updated once a day. BlueHost is the only host I’ve had that gave me this information. I think HostGator and HostMonster also provide it.

	Web Host	Control Panel	Inode Limit
	iPage	vDeck	NO LIMIT!
	Arvixe	cPanel	NO LIMIT!
	Cirtex	cPanel	NO LIMIT!
	HostGator	cPanel	250,000
	BlueHost	cPanel	200,000
	HostMonster	cPanel	200,000
	WebHostingHub	cPanel	75,000
	JustHost	cPanel	50,000