What Are Inodes?

Inodes are essentially the number of files and folders stored in your cPanel. Each file or directory is considered one inode. You can find inode usage in the right hand side of the cPanel:

What Is The Inode Limit For My Create.com Account?

While many other Shared Hosting Providers have limitations of 100k or 200k for Shared Hosting Accounts, we have a limit of 500k inodes per cPanel. Once this limit has been reached, you may experience issues with account accounts that are under that specific cPanel. Issues experienced may include:

• Inability to receive new emails
• Slower website performance
• Inability to upload or create new files directly or via website components such as plugins.

How Can I View A Detailed Breakdown Of My Inode Usage?

If you need to see a specific breakdown of your inode usage, you can go to the Terminal Application in cPanel and type the following command in a terminal window:

find . -printf "%h\n" | cut -d/ -f-2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

This will provide a breakdown of all folders within the Present Working Directory and will have output as follows just running it from where terminal starts you off:

6957 ./public_html
57 ./.cagefs
47 ./tmp
29 .
24 ./.cpanel
22 ./mail
15 ./.softaculous
7 ./ssl
5 ./softaculous_backups
3 ./.wp-cli
3 ./.cphorde
2 ./etc
2 ./.cl.selector
1 ./public_ftp
1 ./.spamassassin
1 ./.pki

The first section in the example above is the number of inodes and the second section is the related folder the inodes represent.

*Example: There are 6957 inodes within the public_html directory for the above account

To see another directory's breakdown, you can simply use CD into that directory. Keep in mind that with Linux (which all of our servers are) everything is case sensitive.

Common Locations That May Utilize A Large Number of Inodes

1. Email Folder
   1. To clean up email folders, we suggest utilizing a Email Client with POP3 to download the messages from the server if they cannot be deleted. You will also want to delete any files in the trash folder.
2. Wp-Content Folder
   1. Removing Cache files as well as any old media files will help reduce inodes. There are plugins that you can also utilized to clean media files such as Media Cleaner
3. Logs Folder
   1. This folder is located at /home/$username/logs. However, these should only be removed if you have a very large number of files within the folder. Typically, you will find that the problem will be in another location rather than this folder.
4. Trash Folder
   1. You can utilize the 'Empty Trash' option in File Manager to empty your trash.