In the post where I talked about the pros and cons of the hosting provider Hostgator, I mentioned how their 50,000 inode limit could cause serious problems to users who wanted to host for example a Moodle platform (go to this post to see the minimum inode number a default Moodle installation uses or other software packages like Wordpress or Gallery).

And in the The attack of the inodes post, I, with the help of some very nice visitors of olivetalks, discussed different ways of finding out the number of inodes in your account before their excess made Hostgator pull the plug.

So, surprise surprise, 28+ weeks after those posts… guess what? Check out the next image!

This is an image taken from the cpanel of my Hostgator account. Not only they show the number of inodes you are using,  but they have increased the limit to 250,000 inodes!! I doubt even I will reach that limit…

Related post(s)

• Hostgator: pros and cons of their web hosting offer (15)
• The return of the inodes – tell me your package and I’ll tell you your inodes (6)
• The attack of the inodes – how to find out your number (9)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• php.ini, symlink and moodle: I’m calling it the php.ini fiasco (0)

When you upload pages to your site, you know how many files and directories there are. If you check your email, the number of emails will give you an additional inode count. As long as in your site you are only going to have files uploaded by you and email accounts, you won’t probably need to worry about inodes. The problem appears if you are planning on having a blog, a forum, a content-management system or any other software package. These packages all have a large quantity of files even just installed. And some are made in such a way as to generate many additional files when you start using them.

Example-case: a basic Moodle installation, with menus only in English and no courses, has 4,850 inodes approximately to start with. If you upload 30 courses, this number goes up to 11,000 inodes. And that’s without any students (real example taken from here). 30 courses are loads. Ok, another example: one Moodle platform with “only” 7 courses BUT 500 students has 20,000 inodes (example taken from here). The reason is that every time a student uploads an exercise, Moodle creates two inodes: one corresponding to the student’s folder inside the exercise folder, and one corresponding to the actual exercise. 5 exercises, 10 inodes. 500 students doing the 5 exercises, 5,000 inodes. And it keeps growing… Furthermore, each language pack has over 600 inodes. So if you want to support different languages, be aware of how the number of inodes is going to increase even more. So knowing this, it is wise not to have more than one Moodle installation in a single web hosting account if you want to have many students. But if you don’t know about inodes, you might get a web hosting package with loads of disk space and as many mysql databases as you want, install Moodle, b2evolution and say Joomla and collapse your server in no time.

I have not been able to find a list of the inodes all well-known packages have to start with. I think this information is important to be able to decide what hosting account to get or how to use your hosting accounts in a more efficient way (for example combine Moodle and a few small scale web pages in a server and a forum and a blog in another). Therefore I have set upon myself the task of compiling an inode count list as complete as possible. At the initial release of this post, the table is far from complete. I will be adding more entries to the table as I find out the number of inodes each installation comes with. If you find out any additional data, do let me know, and I’ll add it to the list. Also, if you’d like me to find out the inode count of any program I don’t have yet, drop me a note as well, and I’ll see what can I do.

Related post(s)

• Inodes 28 weeks later… (2)
• Hostgator: pros and cons of their web hosting offer (15)
• The attack of the inodes – how to find out your number (9)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)

To find out how many inodes are there in a folder or web hosting account, there are three ways. Whether one or another are possible, or all three, will depend on your web hosting provider.

Option 1. Submit a ticket

This one is easy and only takes as long as your provider’s support takes. Just ask them for an inode report on your account. Hostgator complied within 4 hours, and that was for three different accounts.

Advantage of this method: little effort and you don’t have to learn any commands.
Disadvantage of this method: if you haven’t been warned of being above the inode limit, you might be calling their attention to your account unnecessarily. Furthermore, you depend on others to know the number of inodes.

Option 2. Via ssh

If your provider allows you to ssh to your account, then once you are connected, all you have to do is type the following:

find . -printf "%i\n" | sort -u | wc -l

Advantage: quick (it can take 20 seconds to count 10,000 inodes).
Disadvantage: not all web hosting providers allow you ssh access. In Hostgator, for example, you can ask for ssh access but you need to give them a copy of your photo id.

Option 3. Via ftp

This can’t be done using FileZilla or similar. From a Linux machine you must open a terminal and:

1. First make sure you have the curlftpfs package installed. Depending on your Linux distribution it can be as simple as running (as super-user)
   yum install curlftpfs
2. Then you have to create the directory where you want to mount the ftp connection to your hosting account.
   mkdir ftp-domain-folder
   where ftp-domain-folder is the name of the directory you chose.
3. After that you connect to your account.
   curlftpfs -o user=xxxx:yyyy ftp://domain-name.zzz/ ftp-domain-folder/
   where xxxx = user name and yyyy = password.
4. And you run this command to count the inodes.
   find ftp-domain-folder/ | sort -u | wc -l
5. Finally, unmount the folder (requires super-user priviledges):
   umount ftp-domain-folder/

Advantage: you can do it from your computer, quite easy, no need for ssh,…
Disadvantage: it takes quite a bit (over an hour to count 10,000 inodes) and you need to run the commands from a Linux computer.

To check the total number of inodes, if you don’t have ssh access, I would suggest using option 1. Once you know the total number, you can use option 3 to find out the inode count in folders within your hosting account. Each individual folder will not have as many inodes as the whole account so the command will take less time. For example:

find ftp-domain-folder/mail/ | sort -u | wc -l

where mail is the folder where all your email accounts and emails are, or:

find ftp-domain-folder/public_html/folder-name/ | sort -u | wc -l

to check the inodes inside a folder in your account. This way you can check if you have erased enough files if you were reaching the limit.

Related post(s)

• Inodes 28 weeks later… (2)
• Hostgator: pros and cons of their web hosting offer (15)
• The return of the inodes – tell me your package and I’ll tell you your inodes (6)
• Skype 4.0 for Windows is out: Pros and cons (compared with Linux Skype 2.0) (1)
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The pros they advertise in their page are true. In their shared baby and swamp web hosting packages you do get what they say, including the most attractive features:

• unlimited domains (as in, in one account you can add as many domains as you want)
• 6,000 GB of bandwidth in the baby package and unlimited in the swamp one
• 600 GB of disk space in the baby package and 1,000 GB in the swamp one
• unlimited MySQL databases (important if you are going to install Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or other packages)
• Fantastico: easy one-click installation of most of the known scripts/CMS
• …

And an advantage which I have tested myself on a dozen of occasions by now and has always been excellent: answers from their support quick (usually in less than 6 hours) and helpful.

But, these pros and perks of Hostgator have a hidden side to them, which you will see when I explain the cons I have “suffered”.

Now the cons, or fine print details that you should consider before getting one package or another or even deciding if Hostgator is good enough for you. Right now I know of three cons. They have appeared at different times and although they haven’t made me switch to another web hosting provider, they have made me frown at them for a few hours/days. As I said, they do mention them, but until you understand what they mean, they sound like unimportant, when they are not. I am going to describe the three cons and when should you take them into account and take appropriate measures.

1. “Users may not: Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds”

Translation: if you have many web pages or visitors or scripts, even if you have unlimited space, bandwidth, etc., you might use up more than 25% of the CPU, which would cause them to shut down your service. So far it only happened once when a cron job lost the pot: they automatically shut down my cron job facilities without any warning and without me realizing till two weeks later. I say lost the pot because I still don’t really understand what happened. After talking to their support, they enabled the option again.

2. “The use of more than 50,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in suspension.”

Translation: each file and directory counts as an inode. When I encountered this problem, less than a week ago, I searched for explanations of the problem in several forums and I found quite a few places where people were saying that 50,000 inodes is such a large number that surely people that fret over them are exaggerating. Then how come I got two of my three Hostgator accounts with quotas above the inode limit? and not above by a few inodes, I’m talking about a few tens of thousands in one and even a hundred thousand in another! With a week to reduce the amount of inodes within the allowed quota, I’ve had to do some research to understand it better. I mean, I had 50 GB of my 600 GB disk full. How come I had over 200,000 inodes? Two things to know regarding inodes: how to find out how many do you have and how many inodes do different programs/scripts generate. I am working on two follow-up posts, one with instructions on how to obtain the number of inodes of your account or folders and a second one with a table with the number of inodes that standard packages like Wordpress or Moodle have to start with. So the problem is, you might have quite a large amount of disk space, but you cannot have more than 50,000 files, which means 12 MB per file if you were to use the 600 GB. An image displayed on a web page is usually around 30 to 50 kB and a simple html page say around 100 kB… so the magnanimous disk space will be usually unachievable, due to other restrains, and a bit of a misleading offer. Then again, you could use the extra disk space for backups, if not for many web pages.

3. “Mail policy and limits: There is a 200 hourly email limit per domain. If you send over this amount in any hour, most of the e-mails will bounce back with a undeliverable error.”

Translation: Now this policy I did not find in the Terms and Service page. You have to go search for it in their Knowledge pages. Again, surely 200 emails per hour are enough? Think about it, if you have one email account, it is unlikely you’ll ever send 200 emails in an hour. But what if you create 10 accounts? That means that each user should not send more than 20 emails in an hour. Doable? sure… unless you are emailing your siblings, which means you send an email to say two people, they answer and you reply again to both of them and… you can only do it 10 times in an hour. Still ok? The Hostgator offer is “Unlimited mail accounts”… sure, but the moment you have a few users, you will reach the maximum number of emails allowed per hour a lot quicker. It seems Yahoo mail has a limit between 25 and 100 emails per hour, depending on the account and Googlemail 60 per hour. And Hostgator only gives you 200 although you could in theory create a hundred email accounts. By the way, each email counts as an inode! So if you have 20 email accounts with say 500 emails in their accounts each (you can make their inboxes as big as you want, so why not be generous?), that’s 10,000 inodes. But when this really matters is when you have some package installed like Moodle or any other which relies on emails to inform students/members of any news. Say you have a Moodle installation with one course and 5 forums. Say 9 students enrol and there is one tutor. If you want all the students and the tutor to receive an email when somebody comments, that’s 10 emails that will be sent. Say a student enters the course and comments on all 5 forums, one after the other: that’s 50 emails. If another student happens to participate in the forums in the same hour, that’ll be another 10 emails per comment. Add to that exercises (and emails sent to the tutor letting him/her know) and then offer a few courses and you can reach the 200 email limit very easily.

Update: just when I was about to publish this post I decided to contact Hostgator live chat and ask about this email limit. It seems that from quite recently the limit has been increased to 500 emails per hour and that it’s 500 emails per hour per domain, not per hosting service as I thought. So, for example, if in one hosting package you have 3 domains, each of them has a 500 email limit. That still means that if you have 10 email accounts under one domain, you have 500 emails per hour to be divided among those 10 emails. Furthermore, there is a 60 pop-check per hour per domain. This means that if you are checking your email using Thunderbird or MS Outlook, you can only do it 60 times per hour. More than enough. If you have 5 email accounts, each can only check it, 12 times in an hour. If you have 20 accounts, each person should maximum check for new emails every 20 minutes. And if a user has a quick finger, other users might not be able to check their emails in an hour. And you still have to remember that each email is an inode! You can check out the complete new mail policy of Hostgator here.

Some conclusions:

Hostgator’s offer is very good, but you should consider what packages are you going to need (Moodle, b2evolution, Xoops, WebCalendar…), how many emails do you think you’ll need to send per hour, how many domains you’ll want to host and their inodes sizes, etc., before deciding what web hosting you need. You might need a few web hosting accounts, in Hostgator or any other provider! Getting a few hosting accounts could still be cheaper than a semi-dedicated or dedicated server and if you take into account the limitations of the service I’ve described, it can help you choose the best hosting package and distribution of domains per hosting account for your project/situation.

To know how to obtain the inode count of your folders, check out my next post. And if you need any help on deciding what would be the best option for you, do comment, and I’ll be happy to help you out.

Related post(s)

• Inodes 28 weeks later… (2)
• The return of the inodes – tell me your package and I’ll tell you your inodes (6)
• The attack of the inodes – how to find out your number (9)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• php.ini, symlink and moodle: I’m calling it the php.ini fiasco (0)

So I learnt…

1. to set the register_globals off, one must place a “php.ini” file with the line register_globals = OFF in every folder of the server (thank you bergmann at the joomla forum!)
2. but this php.ini cannot just contain the register_globals line. The Computer guys at the University of Washington explain it really well in Using a php.ini File, basically saying: if the directory that calls a PHP script contains a php.ini file, that is the one (and only) from where the PHP configuration settings will be read, so you must first obtain the Web server’s php.ini file and add your own particular settings.
3. now, I don’t know about other Hosting services, but you cannot access the php.ini file in Hostgator through ftp directly. ronniead in a brilliant step by step post in an aMember Professional forum, explains how to use a script to both copy the original php.ini file of the Web server and add the extra user settings. This “Creating a custom php.ini file” script from B&T’s Tips & Scripts is easy to download and use, following ronniead instructions. Only one catch.. it did not work for me.
4. a bit more research and I found out that the function which appears in the script from B&T’s Tips & Scripts: file_put_contents() works with PHP5 but not with PHP4 which is what I have. Some googling for “file_put_contents() for PHP4″ brings up quite a few implementations of the PHP5 file_put_contents() function for PHP4. The one I settled for can be found in Stoyan Stefanov’s blog phpied.com (thanks Stoyan!)
5. So a bit of messing around with both the script and Stoyan’s implementation and I finally got the script to create a custom php.ini file for PHP4 working. And here comes the moment to give back to society.
6. You can either copy and paste the following code in a text editor, and then save as php_ini.php, or download the script from here: php_ini_PHP4.txt (right-click, Save Link As… and as it’s in .txt format, once downloaded, change the ending to .php).


<?php
// Put all the php.ini parameters you want to change below. One per line.
// Follow the example format $parm[] = "parameter = value";
$parm[] = "register_globals = Off";
$parm[] = "session.use_trans_sid = 0 ";

// full unix path - location of the default php.ini file at your host
// you can determine the location of the default file using phpinfo()
$defaultPath = '/usr/local/lib/php.ini';

// full unix path - location where you want your custom php.ini file
// if you don't know the full unix path, uncomment the next line and run the script
// echo getcwd() . "\n";
// you will see the full path (and probably an error message)
$customPath = "/home/user/public_html/php.ini";

// nothing should change below this line.
if (file_exists($defaultPath)) {
$contents = file_get_contents($defaultPath);
$contents .= "\n\n; USER MODIFIED PARAMETERS FOLLOW\n\n";
foreach ($parm as $value) $contents .= $value . " \n";

// code added for the script to work with PHP4
if (!function_exists('file_put_contents')) {
function file_put_contents($customPath,$contents) {
$f = @fopen($customPath, 'w');
if (!$f) {
return false;
} else {
$bytes = fwrite($f, $contents);
fclose($f);
return $bytes;
}
}
}
// end of added code for script to work with PHP4

if (file_put_contents($customPath,$contents)) {
if (chmod($customPath,0600)) $message = "The php.ini file has been modified and copied";
else $message = "Processing error - php.ini chmod failed";
} else {
$message = "Processing error - php.ini write failed";
}
} else {
$message = "Processing error - php.ini file not found";

}
echo $message;
?>


So there it is, the script to create the custom php.ini file for PHP4. Let me know how it goes!

Related post(s)

• Inodes 28 weeks later… (2)
• The return of the inodes – tell me your package and I’ll tell you your inodes (6)
• The attack of the inodes – how to find out your number (9)
• Hostgator: pros and cons of their web hosting offer (15)
• php.ini, symlink and moodle: I’m calling it the php.ini fiasco (0)