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All About Inodes

Inodes, what are they?​

Inodes refer to each individual file that is currently on your account. This is different from how large or how much disk space your account is using.

How does this affect me?​

Accounts on any shared hosting account may not have an excessive number of inodes. Any account found to have over 100,000 inodes may be removed from our backup system to prevent overload. Any account seen to be exceeding 250,000 inodes is at risk for suspension. A warning will be sent and if no action is taken to resolve the issue, the account may be suspended. Every file on the account is counted as 1 inode. This includes mail as well as webpage content.

How am I informed about this?​

This is stated in our Resource Abuse Policy which you can see here

The reason why we have to exclude clients from backups is to keep the server from overloading with the amount of inodes.

All Linux servers have a limited number of Inodes it can hold similar to Disk Space. A client with a high amount of inodes take a while to backup and can cause issues on the server.

How can I check how many inodes I have?​

For Shared Hosting users:

You can view how many inodes you have by logging into cPanel and viewing the File Usage. This will be under 'Stats' on the left hand side after you login to cPanel.

For users with a Dedicated Server or VPS:

You can view how many inodes through cPanel as well however if you are not seeing File Usage in cPanel you will need to enable it in Tweak Settings:

Once you enable File Usage, you should be able to view it under cPanel for each account

What can I do to resolve this?​

You will want to look over all your files and see what exactly is holding the most inodes.

Sometimes, an account will go over inodes simply due to having multiple Addon or Subdomains. One way to fix this is to upgrade to a Reseller account which will allow you to have multiple cPanel accounts.

If you need to know how to move a Addon domain to it's own cPanel account, follow this guide.

You may also want to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated server.

Another common place for inodes to build up is email. Make sure to check your email to see if any spam is coming in or if there is any old email that could be moved or removed.

If you need to remove or delete files, this can be done either using an FTP program or File Manager. If you need help accessing these files, here's an article that will give you the steps on how to do so.