"Unlimited Disk Space" on shared hosting False...

[tahma]

Hello,

Host Gator has been great I must say, apart from the few times the server has gone offline, everything runs fine, and having 24/7 live tech is great *sometimes, some of them don't know what to do or how to help you* Overall Host Gator has been great! So for service, server quality and reliability you get an 8 out of 10.

But here's the rant :P Recently, as my sites grow larger, I went back to review the policy on my bandwidth, disk space and domain/sub-domain limits, I had forgotten If a limit was there in "fine print" because I knew I saw "Unlimited" when I signed up and that's why I picked Host Gator.

I must admit, I never paid attention to what Inodes were till today. I wondered what Inodes were and how it went up, from the tooltip: "Every time a file is created on the server, a Inode (index node) is created..." I see a limit of 250k, don't forget that emails, databases, etc, anything that's not part of Host Gators default server add to Inodes too on top of files you create or upload. My issue here is the fact that your "UNLIMITED" displayed on packages is not true, you are LIMITED by 250k Inodes.

How can it be "Unlimited" When it is LIMITED by Inodes? You cannot have unlimited disk space if you're limited by 250k Inodes, I just had to repeat that one a few times to get the point across I'm not happy with how this was pulled and how you packages display "Unlimited Disk Space" When it's infact not true.

The "unlimited" needs to state that it is limited by 250k Inodes and everytime you create a file you create an Inode index. I'm assuming it's 1 file for 1 Inode index?

Is there a plan to change the advertisement on your hosting packages so future users know? Not that it's a huge deal if you run a small site...

PS: Since it's per file created this means sub-domains/domains are also not "unlimited" but limited by 250k Inodes. Tsk tsk...

[GatorDHanna]

The amount of space and bandwidth you have is technically unlimited. The inode restriction is in place to ensure a more stable file system on each of our servers. The file systems we use simply aren't designed to handle millions of files for each of the customers on the server, which is why we do place a restriction on them.

If you wanted to upload 250,000 large files, you could do that. There is nothing say that each of those inodes has to be 1 or 2 KB each, so actual disk space used isn't really the concern.

As I'm sure you know, it's impossible for anyone to deliver something that's truly unlimited. Our CEO has written about our move to unlimited space and bandwidth on two occasions. The first one was posted in October 2007 and then the second one was posted in November 2008. They might be of interest to you.

Hopefully this clarifies the situation a bit. If you have any other questions or concerns, feel free to let us know.