An inode is a data structure used to keep information about a file on your hosting account. The number of inodes indicates the number of files and folders you have. This includes everything on your account, emails, files, folders, anything you store on the server.
There is currently an limit of 100k/250k inodes on our shared accounts.
What is the 100k/250k inode limit?
Shared and Reseller servers only allow 100,000 files per cPanel. This is a "Soft limit" meaning that while the limit is reached, you will still be able to upload files. However once the account passes the 100,000 file threshold it will no longer be included in our weekly backups. Additionally, if the account happens to exceed 250,000 files then it will be in violation of our Terms of Service and can result in possible suspension.
VPS accounts are limited to one million (1,000,000) inodes. Unlike Shared/Resller accounts this is a "Hard limit," if the threshold is reached you will no longer be able to upload files to your account. Inodes do not affect the weekly backups for VPS accounts.
Dedicated servers have no inode limits in place, only those that exist for the file system on the server (such as ext3).
How can I reduce my inode count?
Simply delete any files or emails you no longer need.
How can I see how many inodes I am using?
Shared customers can see the inode count in cPanel on the left-hand menu. You must be using the HG style for this feature.
Reseller's can call or join live chat and we will be glad to check the inode usage for your account.
VPS customers can view the current inode usage from the Virtuozzo Panel, simply click on the Resources icon and check under the disk usage section. The limit is called "diskinodes" and will report how many inodes are currently on your VPS account.
For dedicated customers you can check the inodes of an account on your server by using SSH:
quota -s <cpanel username>
If you have SSH access to your account you can view the inodes for a specific folder using the following command:
echo "Detailed Inode usage for: $(pwd)" ; for d in `find -maxdepth 1 -type d |cut -d\/ -f2 |grep -xv . |sort`; do c=$(find $d |wc -l) ; printf "$c\t\t- $d\n" ; done ; printf "Total: \t\t$(find $(pwd) | wc -l)\n"
While this may look messy, it outputs a nicely formatted list of detailed inode usage on your account.
TOS Inode violations can consist of the following (however not limited to):
- Continuously publishing and deleting large numbers of files (i.e. 10,000+)
- If the cPanel account exceeds 250,000 inodes, Please refer to section 7b) of our Terms of Service.
