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 (16)
• 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 (16)
• The attack of the inodes – how to find out your number (9)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)

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)

In my post Register_Globals Off and PHP4, I went through the steps I took to achieve setting register_globals = OFF in my server. I was quite excited with my success and everything seemed to work just fine. Obviously, 24 hours later, the problems started to surface.

Now, I’m still quite happy with the whole php.ini and symlink procedure, but the same way I wrote a post on the coolness of the process, I think it will be good to share the bad experiences, in case I can prevent or at least, warn, other people in the same situation.

So far, the most important “bad” consequence of symlinking the php.ini file in all the folders in the server has been its interaction with how Moodle handles the uploaded assignments of students.

When tutors went to grade their students uploades tasks, they found that most uploaded .odt, .doc, .ods, .xls, .pdf, … documents had been replaced by php.ini. And the original exercises seemed to have disappeared overnight.

Moodle uses the following folder system:
http://domain-name/moodle-installation/file.php/7/moddata/assignment/19/6/exercise

where, in this example,

• 7 is the course number
• 19 is the assignment number
• 6 would be the student’s number

And what Moodle does is once a student has uploaded an exercise, it will display the most recent file in that folder. As you can see in the following image, although the task of the student was uploaded on the 27th of September 2007, it is showing the task as php.ini (which was really created on the date of my previous post, January 17th):

To see and correct the problem, you must access the folder:
/moodle-installation/uploaddata/7/moddata/assignment/19/6/

As you can see in the next image (the images are linked to their full sizes so you can see them better):

in the folder for this student, for this particular assignment and course, besides the original file the student uploaded in September, there is the php.ini symlink (Filezilla identifies it as a folder).

As the php.ini symlink, saying that register_globals should be off, is only strictly needed in the folders where php scripts are executed from, it is not really necessary to have the symlink there. So you can “just” erase it. If you are using FileZilla, you might have the program ignore your request and complain that:

550 Can’t change directory to php.ini: Not a directory

Well, I knew that… Solution I have found: create a folder, move the php.ini symlink to that folder, and erase the folder with the php.ini inside. It seems to work. For completeness I will add that the FileZilla “Not a directory” complain, showed up both in a FileZilla run in Linux and in a Virtual Machine Windows XP Installation. It did not complain, however, in a FileZilla in a laptop running Windows XP.

Once the php.ini symlink is erased, Moodle will display the correct uploaded task again.

This process if you have loads of students/assignments, can be a bit of a pain. Obviously, a script could be written to erase the php.ini symlink from the assignment folders, or even better, the initial symlink script could be modified to exclude the Moodle folders where you don’t want the symlink created. Without either of these scripts, though

1. it would be better to run symlink, before any students enroll in the courses
2. if you have a server with a Moodle installation and want to install a 2nd one… I would be weary of running symlink again without some solution…

No, I do not have that solution, but if anybody does, I’m all ears. And if anybody finds him or herself in a similar situation, or has other problems with Moodle, do share your experiences with me! I might be able to help or learn from you

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)
• Hostgator: pros and cons of their web hosting offer (16)
• Register_Globals Off and PHP4 (1)