Member
Sure, but then you're trading off against maximum file size and fsck time. At shared-hosting scale with thousands of users, conservative defaults are defensible. The sin is the word "unlimited" on the marketing page, not the filesystem layout.
I've seen providers run XFS specifically to avoid the inode preallocation problem entirely. Hetzner knows this exists as an option.
Retired ISP guy perspective: inode limits on shared hosting date back to the 90s when /var/spool/mail was the killer. Every user with 10 years of email was a thousand tiny files. We solved it with maildir quotas, not filesystem inodes, but the principle is identical.
The "unlimited" word should have died with the FTC's 2000s broadband enforcement actions, but hosting fell through the cracks. No regulator cares about German server specs.
Member
I don't understand half of what you all are saying but I just checked my HostGator account and I have 180,000 files in a WordPress install with plugins. Should I be worried? I don't even know how to check my inode limit.
Member OP
SSH in (if they allow it) and run
df -iWordPress with plugins and themes is a classic inode bomb. Every thumbnail size, every cache file, every translation string in its own file. It adds up fast.
If your domain portfolio is anything like mine, you have thirty WordPress installs doing nothing. That's the real inode tax. I moved everything to static on Cloudflare Pages for the idle ones. The three I actually use run on a single Vultr instance where I can see the limits upfront.
Domains are cheap. Inodes are expensive. The math doesn't matter until it does.
Can someone explain why OVHcloud is better on this? I looked at their specs and I see "unlimited traffic" but nothing about inodes on the shared hosting page either. Is it just higher in practice?
OVHcloud's VPS TOS actually specifies: 500k inodes for Personal, 1M for Pro, 2M for Performance. It's in the fine print, not the marketing bullets. At least it's findable if you search "inode site:ovhcloud.com".
Hetzner's shared plan specs don't mention it at all. You only find out from the KB article after suspension, or from threads like this. Their docs are here: https://docs.hetzner.com
This thread saved me. Was about to move 15 client sites to Hetzner shared "unlimited." Now looking at their cloud plans instead. More expensive but at least I know the limits.
Has anyone actually tested whether Hetzner will raise the inode limit on request? Some providers do if you ask nicely and have a legitimate use case. Or is this hard-capped at the plan level?