The term “unlimited” frequently appears in WordPress hosting providers’ sales pages. Typically you’ll see unlimited domains, disk space, and bandwidth. The promise of unlimited disk space and bandwidth is attractive by design and regardless if you need it or not it could sway your decision over a different provider offering less. And this clever marketing is how I came to be a Hostwinds.com customer over another provider. I was even willing to spend a little extra money each month for better site performance and a dedicated IP address. However, after several hours of site downtime last week forced me to make an emergency switch to a new hosting provider, I realized Hostwinds’ unlimited WordPress hosting was anything but that.
The Myth of Unlimited Hosting Plans
Unlimited hosting is a marketing tactic -a sales gimmick promising endless resources for your websites. Don’t rush into believing these promises without careful consideration. The supposed unlimited hosting plans will in fact contain multiple hidden restrictions which can negatively affect your website operation and performance. In addition to CPU throttling and disk IO, Inodes are another restriction unlimited plans have that you may not be aware of and will cause unexpected downtime. Inodes restrictions expose the myth of unlimited disk space. Your hosting plan may say unlimited disk space but in fact your hosting provider is only allowing your plan an allotment of 60,000 inodes for example.
What are WordPress Hosting Inodes?
If you’re new to WordPress hosting, think of inodes as little index cards in a library. Every file or folder within your hosting plan’s directory structure —like your WordPress site’s images, plugins, or theme files—gets its own card. This card doesn’t hold the actual file but keeps track of stuff like where it’s stored, its size, and who can access it. So, why should you care about inodes when picking a WordPress hosting plan? Well, lots of hosts put a limit on how many inodes you can have.
It’s like they’re saying, “You can only have so many index cards!” WordPress sites can eat up inodes fast—every picture you upload, every plugin file, every cached page, and even emails (if your host handles email) adds to the count. A small site might use 10,000 inodes, but a big one with tons of photos or plugins? That could hit 200,000 or more in no time. If you max out your inode limit, your site might not let you upload new files, add plugins, or even save changes. It’s like trying to stuff one more book into a packed shelf—it just won’t work! Most shared hosting plans have inodes limits and incredibly they don’t advertise it clearly.
If your hosting plan exceeds it’s inodes allotment it will cause issues until you remediate the situation. And that’s exactly what happened to me at Hostwinds.
WordPress 503 Errors
It all started when I got a notification from uptimerobot that my site was throwing a 503 error. And then I got more notifications about 503 errors for some other sites I host. Upon investigating further I discovered all the sites on my Hostwinds plan were down with 503 errors. Naturally I contacted their support department and they informed me that my sites weren’t really down. “We verified the websites are currently working at our end.” WTF!
Here are actual quotes from my Hostwinds support tickets:
“I understand that you are experiencing issues with the website. Upon investigation, it’s apparent that your site has exceeded resource limits, including CPU and I/O usage, within the past 24 hours….Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you require further assistance or have any queries.”
Naturally I required further assistance and opened a new support ticket in which I learned that my unlimited hosting account was in fact not unlimited.
Quoting again from my Hostwinds support ticket:
“The resource limit is placed on a per-user account basis on a shared server environment. The resource usage will be monitored live, and the website will frequently not work whenever your cpanel account exceeds a resource limit. You can review the current resource usage utilized by your cpanel account using the “Resource Usage” feature in cpanel. Below is the screenshot showing the current resource usage of your cpanel account.”
“We notice that your account’s physical memory and I/O usage have been exceeded. Since you have a shared plan in which you are using multiple domains, the physical memory consumption is calculated including the usage of all the hosted websites on your cpanel account. Therefore, please audit the website contents and optimize them with the help of the developer to minimize resource consumption. We verified the websites are currently working at our end.”
And more restating the obvious but not actually providing any assistance with my issue. Why have I been paying for managed support all these years.
“Please be informed that the resources are limited since you are using a shared hosting plan. In a Cloud Linux-based shared hosting environment, once a website account reaches its limit of set resources, the site will begin to slow down. The website account consuming too many resources will temporarily stop working until resource usage returns normally.”
By this point my support request had bounced around 3-4 different people over several hours. One engineer was able to identify 2 sites which on his end appeared to be causing the issues.
Both of the sites had wp-con running and on one of the sites the WordPress theme had completely broken and was showing html and CSS syntax everwhere. But honestly I have no idea what the issue was because these sites had been hosted as is at Hostwinds for several years.
I used to work for a web hosting company as a Tier 3 engineer. I understand the stress and pressure that one can experience in that role so I was polite in my engagements but I was colossally frustrated, unsatisfied, and tremendously disappointed with Hostwinds support. They promoted their hosting plan as unlimited and it’s not. No where in the marketing documentation does it mention resource utilization limits.
Additionally part of the monthly fee for hosting is for managed service which means they’re supposed to help you when you have issues. 90% of my engagement with their support department was providing me screen captures of the Cpanel dashboard. Only 1 engineer bothered to look into my issue and actually offer help.
After being down for 4 hours I started moving all my sites to a new hosting provider and was off the Hostwinds server a few hours later. Naturally after moving all my sites the resource utilization went to zero -LOL. I didn’t realize it at first but this was all due to my unlimited hosting plan’s hidden inodes allotment. As soon as I moved the first site off the Hostwinds plan to the new service provider (and deleted the site), the 503 errors disappeared and the remaining sites were all back online.
How to lower WordPress Inodes Utilization
Remember the server hosting your unlimited WordPress account uses inodes as index cards to track all files and folders including images and plugins as well as cached pages and even emails. Everything associated with your hosting account in Cpanel will count toward inodes utilization.
Here are some steps to reduce your inodes footprint.
- Remove all unused files and backups because each file and folder takes up one inode which you can free up by deleting them.
- You should compress your images and move them to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) because this approach decreases the number of files stored directly on your server thus lowering inode usage.
- Regularly remove all unnecessary emails from your email accounts because they increase the inode count when you have email hosting.
- Select plugins with care while configuring security and caching plugins to reduce the number of temporary files that build up and increase inode usage.
- Check your server files system regularly to detect orphaned files and temporary items including old logs and unused database backups which you should remove to keep inode numbers low.
In Summary
In the end despite the heartburn it was a valuable learning experience. My sites are now with a service provider that is actually several dollars per month cheaper than Hostwinds and my account has literally 10x more resources for utilization. Thanks for reading.
