How To Decrease Web Hosting Inode Usage In CPanel
What is Inode?
Inodes are data structures used to store the meta data of files. Inode number refers to the collective number of files and folders existing in your web hosting account.
What is Inode Limit ?
Just login to your cPanel home page. In the left pane you can see the ‘File Usage’ stat as shown in the screenshot below which is the Inode usage of your account.
View Inode usage in cPanel
Most people will not need to be familiar with Inodes if they are using their hosting in normal circumstances such as for a basic or intermediate website and normal email use. However, some web hosting companies may impose inodes quota on the user account. For normal shared hosting, usually the standard inodes limit would be 250,000 files. Some will limit up to 500k files, and some providers will not display their inodes limits on their packages but they do in their Terms of Use fineprint. Why do the need to implement this inodes limit? simply because they don’t want users to place unnecessary files on the server.
Not all inode overages are caused by abuse though. It could just be that you need to do a bit of a clean up of your hosting files. If you experience issues caused by high Inode usage then this tutorial is to help you decrease the number of inodes on your account.
Here are some steps to reduce the inode number limit.
1) Delete Unnecessary Files And Folders
Examine the files and folders manually and decide on if the file is necessary or not. In case if the file is an old backup archive or if the folder is created for testing or staging purpose, you may remove it or download it locally via FTP or cPanel >> FileManager and delete it from the server.
2) Clear Old And Spam Emails
Deleting the old emails helps a lot in decreasing the inode usage. There might be spam mails in your mailbox which are of no use and deleting those mails will hep you to reduce the inode number. You can remove spam emails from email client or webmail. You can seek hosting cleaning services from our support team as well.
3) Clear The Cache Files
Most of the CMSs uses cache to reduce the response time and application like Joomla can create a lot of cache files which can increase the inode usage tremendously. So it is advised to keep an eye on the cache folders and make sure the number of cache files is the least.
Most of the CMSs now provide the facility to purge the cache and you can make use of it to control the number of cache files. Or you can setup a cronjob to automatically clear the cache files periodically.
If you have the inode limit getting hit regularly or you still have issues after you have cleared up your files, we suggest you to upgrade the package to a higher one with higher inode limit or consider a Virtual Private Server instead.
