Shared hosting operating system (OS) developer CloudLinux has announced the release of a new feature that can be used to limit inodes. The feature gives shared hosting companies more control over server usage.
Using CloudLinux Inode Limits for cPanel, web hosting providers would be able to effectively limit the number of files and folders on a per account or per package basis, making server performance more consistent. This is especially useful for web hosting providers who market shared hosting services based on ‘unlimited’ disk space, but want to prevent customers from filling up the hard disks.
Setting Per Account Limits
With CloudLinux, shared hosting accounts are contained in Lightweight Virtual Environments, or LVEs. LVEs can be controlled from an interface called LVE Manager, where limits can be set for a wide range of hardware resources. This range now includes inodes; a data structure that stores useful information about files and folders.
Counting the number of inodes in a given partition would be an effective way to gauge the number of files and folders currently stored. As a result, setting a per package or per account limit on the number of inodes helps keep shared hosting customers within their allocated disk space quota.
Servikus LLC
“The inode issue had been bothering us for a long time,” said Ivan Rakić, CEO at Servikus LLC. “We had some abusive users and some badly written scripts that affected performance across entire servers. We actually started to develop our own solution for inode limitation in cPanel but, just a few days into development, CloudLinux told us that Inode Limits would be coming to the OS. Now, we are able to limit abusive users without investing our own time and money into developing technology. Best of all, the solution can limit abusive users while remaining flexible enough to handle the occasional inode usage spike.”
CloudLinux was founded in 2009 to address the distinctive needs of web hosting providers. The company’s headquarters are in Princeton, New Jersey, and its development team, composed of employees with an appreciable proficiency in the hosting business, is based in Donetsk, Ukraine. The company’s flagship OS is optimized to help web hosting providers deliver more stable shared hosting services, with account isolation and resource allocation on an OS level.
