Inode is a data structure that stores the information about all files created on your hosting account. The number of inodes indicates the number of files, folders, email or anything you store on your web hosting account. Each file on your web hosting account is identified by an inode number in the file system. Inodes store the important data about files such as user, group ownership, access mode and file type.
View Inode Usage Via CPanel
Just login to your cPanel home page. On the right card under “Statistics” you can see the ‘inodes’ used.
Exceeding the inodes limit
Once the inodes limit is reached, your account behaves in the same way as when the disk space limit is exceeded. Basically, you won’t be able to create/upload new files, receive emails, write data in the MySQL database, and your cPanel will show errors as no temporary files can be stored on your account anymore. You might also see your website down if the application used is doing continuous queries to the database, storing new data or if it requires to save new data in a temporary folder.
How Can I Reduce My inode Count?
You can reduce the number of inodes in your account by simply deleting unwanted files or emails from your account.
Most of the CMSs use cache to reduce the response time and applications 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.
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 help you to reduce the inode number. You can remove spam emails from email client or webmail.
Another way to resolve the excessive inodes usage would be to upgrade to a higher plan to better accommodate your hosting account needs.
