If you've had WordPress hosting for any length of time, it's likely you've ran across the Inode Limit inside your cPanel:

Sometimes this can be alarming to newcomers who don't understand what it is.

We have an article in our knowledgebase that actually explains the technical terms of an Inode:

An inode is a data structure in a Unix-style file system that describes a filesystem object such as a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the object’s data. Filesystem object attributes may include metadata (times of last change, access, modification), as well as owner and permission data. Directories are lists of names assigned to inodes. A directory contains an entry for itself, its parent, and each of its children.

Look At Inodes Like Individual Files

So basically, 1 file (such as a PHP page, email, image, etc.) is equal to 1 Inode.

If you notice, all of our WordPress hosting packages offer amount some disk usage, but contain a limit on the number of Inodes per account.

What Uses The Most Inodes?

Nine times out of ten when a user runs into these limits it's because they're not regularly clearing their email inboxes or they're trying to host too many websites in one cPanel.

Spam folders for example can quickly fill-up with a lot of junk. Inside of cPanel you can actually set these to automatically delete after 30 days. This is actually how Gmail functions and is certainly recommended.

Complimentary Backups Only For 100,000 Inodes

In order for us to maintain a high-speed cloud infrastructure we have to place some type of limit when doing our complimentary nightly backups.

After much testing, we've set the cut-off at 100,000 Inodes OR 20GB in overall disk usage. If you reach either of those limits, your cPanel won't be included in the complimentary nightly backups.

Simply put, this would put too much strain on the Solid State Drives and would cause a degrade in performance.