Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Multiple Blogs and Unlimited Shared Hosting

Can an unlimited shared web hosting account host unlimited Wordpress blogs?

Nowadays almost all web hosting providers offer unlimited web hosting plan which includes unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited domain add-on. In reality, there is always some sort of restriction on resource usage. How much you can store normally relates to how many inodes you will use. Every time a file is created on your web server, an inode is created, which is basically system information about your file. Take Hostgator as an example, they recommend a usage of below 250,000 inodes. If you use more than 100,000 inodes, only your databases will be backed up during their weekly backup schedule.

So how many Wordpress blogs can be hosted with a Hostgator Baby plan? Assuming you prefer weekly full backup, so you don't want to go over the 100k inode limit. Again assume your average blog has 20 posts, a couple of themes, and roughly 10 plugins in your directory, it will take about 2500 inodes. So 100k inodes is good for 40 Wordpress blogs! Wait! There are other essential files in your hosting account, you need to save some inodes for mail, stat, tmp, and etc files. So a Baby plan is probably only good for 30 small Wordpress blogs. Eventually, some of your blogs will grow in size, and you will need something better than Baby plan.