An Inode is a data structure used to store the meta data of a file. The number of inodes indicates the number of files and folders you have under your hosting account. All the shared hosting service providers maintain these limits in order to avoid disk abuse as having large number of files on the system causes IO issues resulting in slowness for all the sites on the server.
Limits
The implemented inodes limits are:
Soft limit (150,000): If your inode count is 150K, your account will be removed from automatic weekly backups.
Hard limit (250,000): When the inode count reaches 250K, no further files can be added to the account.
If your hosting account usage is normal, you will not need to check the inodes limit, however if your account is creating large number of files automatically sprouting thousands of files within a day then you may hit the inode limit and may require to clean or properly configure your account.
The good news is you can very easily get your account under the limit by following these guidelines:
- Delete the unnecessary files and folders under your account
- Delete junk or spam emails
- Delete cache created by many CMS
You can also contact us and we can provide you with exact location of folder where most of inodes are being used.
