An inode is a single file uploaded to your hosting plan. The number of e-mails, website files, uploaded archives, images or any other files on your hosting plan are equal to the number of Inodes. Tracking Inode usage is important. If a limit will be reached, this will result in a restriction from adding additional files to the hosting plan, until some of the Inodes will be freed up. In this guide, you will see how to check detailed Inode usage for your hosting plan.

You can see the total Inode usage shown in the “Statistics” category on the main cPanel page.

1. Log in to your shared hosting plan with cPanel.

Log in to your account in our Clients Area: https://billing.hostens.com/clientarea
Choose your Web Hosting(cPanel) service;
Press the button “Access Control Panel” on the left menu. Then press the button “Click here to access control panel“.

After accessing the cPanel menu, you will see your Inode(File Usage) statistics provided on the right in the “Statistics” menu:

2. In the category “Files” choose the option “Inode Usage”.

3. On the opened page you will see the listed results of directories that have over 10.000 Inodes.

4. Since “Inode Usage” shows details only for directories that have over 10.000 Inodes, more detailed information is available through the terminal of cPanel.

Notice: Terminal usage is advised only for advanced users.

To access the terminal, in the cPanel menu “Advanced” section choose the option “Terminal”.

On the opened terminal page you can try using the following commands:

Show total Inode usage:

find . | wc -l

Inode usage for directories and files located in the current directory:

find . -printf "%h\n" | cut -d/ -f-2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

List of Top50 directories by the number of Inode on those directories (number of results displayed described by “head -50” value):

find . -xdev -type d -exec sh -c 'echo "$(find "$0" | grep "^$0/[^/]*$" | wc -l) $0"' {} \; | sort -rn | head -50