Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

June 09, 2011

Inodes: Web Hosting Dirty Little Secret

It’s common knowledge that in a competitive market in order to remain a viable competitor, misleading and false advertisements are directed toward consumers in hopes of landing huge profits.  Unfortunately, this happens all too often and un-expecting customers are dubed into believing they bought a Cadillac version, when in reality it’s just a lemon in disguise.  The same can be said when purchasing a web host that claims to offer unlimited features such as bandwidth and disk space.

With the barrage of web hosts promoting unlimited services, it’s quite easy to become confused when trying to choose the best host to accommodate hosting needs.  Many claim to deliver unlimited bandwidth rates and disk storage space; however, the majority of hosting providers neglect to inform users of loophole and clauses buried in the service agreement.   One such example is inodes.

What are inodes?

While most users are not familiar with inodes, those in the industry are well-aware of the term and understand the significant impact inodes play when hosts claim to offer unlimited features.  “In computing, an inode is a data structure on a traditional Unix-style file system such as UFS.  An inode stores basic information about a regular file, directory or other file system object.” An inode also identifies the following attributes: file type, file length, device ID, User and/or Group ID and timestamps.

In simple terms, inodes is the number of files on a server.  An inode is created each time a file is create or uploaded to the web host account.  A generous web hosting provides hundreds of thousands of inodes, while others only offer less than 50,000.  Unfortunately, unless you read the fine print of the usage agreement before signing, you probably won’t have any idea of the allocated amount until you exceed the limit.  The majority of web hosts deliberately refuse to discuss inode usage because it dims the light on feature unlimited services.

What should you know?

HostGator is a popular web host provider that goes against the grain to tackle the subject of inodes. HostGator offers users a 250,00-inode capacity, compared to the 50,000 inode allowance from providers such as JustHost and BlueHost. Users planning to install a CMS application should be conscious of the amount of inodes allowed per account as Joomla can take up 50,000 inodes alone.  For those interested in discovering the quantity of inodes users may use cPanel to check the number of inodes being used by viewing the Statistics sidebar.

Although a 250,000 limit more than adequately suffices to manage most websites, it’s important to understand that unlimited web hosting service doesn’t always necessarily mean access without any applicable restrictions.  Always read the small print before signing any user agreement to determine precisely what services and features your web hosting package includes preventing your account from being suspended.

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