Been told by BH to reduce files to below 50K

[asounddesign]

I know there are some posts on this already but I am at my wits end. I have several webs sites hosted taking up about 100,000 files. From the list in File Count it seems that the only way I am going to chop this number of files is to delete just about every web site.

Please can someone help out.

[redsox9]

What exactly do you want us to tell you? If your file count is above the magic number, you either need to find a way to reduce the count or speak with BH about what allowances they might be able to grant you.

[felgall]

With that many files you probably should be considering either a VPS or dedicated server.

[asounddesign]

I guess I thought that when I joined about 2 years ago that 'unlimited domains,unlimited disk space' meant 'unlimited domains,unlimited disk space'. Obviously things have changed since.

[EricJ]

I guess I thought that when I joined about 2 years ago that 'unlimited domains,unlimited disk space' meant 'unlimited domains,unlimited disk space'.

You do have unlimited domains and unlimited disk space.. filecount != space.. space is something measured in bytes.. they didn't say 'get your account under 300mb'.. it is unlimited space..

[asounddesign]

My problem is that to get my space under 50,000 is that I would need to delete just about half of my sites and all the server logs. I run mainly Joomla, Wordpress and some PHPLD directories. I just cannot see what else I can do but to take some of these offline. Can someone enlighten me please as to what I could do.

[redsox9]

Maybe the question to ask yourself is what can I live without on my account? Also, is it clear what installation is causing the high file count? Does one installation (Joomla, Wordpress) require more files? In all honesty, you need to make the hard decisions on what to do. Perhaps you need another account?

[amatwin]

Felgall and RedSox gave good suggestions. You can set up a second account and move some of your sites to a new account, or get a vps/dedicated server. This way you can keep all of your sites.

[flighter]

For this very reason I left iPower some 2 years ago. They started introducing more and more limitations. Now, let me explain:

Let's assume space limit is 1500 GB, with file number limit 50K. That would mean that, if youo use 100% of the space, average file size will be 30MB!!!

Knowing how big (small) some files, expecially gifs, can be, some files would probably go well above 1 GB.

What pains me is a kind of deception that is happening here. BH says unlimited space, but is effectively making it impossible to utilise that, ummmm, unlimited space. There is no way someone will use, for instance, 1500 GB (which was last LIMITED space, before introducing unlimited space).

I am using just over 3 GB (maybe total of 4 GB), and number of files is already above 100K. And I am running just 3 phpBB forums, one gallery and few other minor things. One of the biggest problem sis gallery. it saves, as most of php galleries, pictures as individual files. So, gallery has some 30K photos on it, add to it cached files etc... and whoa, you are well voer the limit.

This is like saying that someone can use your room throughout the year, 24/7, but can enter it only 17 times and stay up to one hour each time.

Not that I really need zillion gigabytes, but I certainly DO need a lot higher file count limit. Someone who has only 5-pages site does not, but most of advanced users do.

Also, file number limit must clearly be stated in the list of features. I may be too old to remember at the age of 40, but I am absolutely sure that was not stated in the list of features in January 2008. Only recently it appeared in web file manager and some other points.

Bad, bad practice.

by the way, what is the average number of accounts hosted in a single box at BH?

[felgall]

Not that I really need zillion gigabytes, but I certainly DO need a lot higher file count limit. Someone who has only 5-pages site does not, but most of advanced users do.

Also, file number limit must clearly be stated in the list of features. I may be too old to remember at the age of 40, but I am absolutely sure that was not stated in the list of features in January 2008. Only recently it appeared in web file manager and some other points.

by the way, what is the average number of accounts hosted in a single box at BH?

I beliieve BlueHost have around 400 accounts on each box and so if all of them had 50,000 files then that would be twenty milliion files (which presumably would take a really long time -probably several days - to verify them all if the box crashed and needed repair). I wouldn't expect many accounts to have anywhere near 50,000 files though. Most would have only a few thousand files. If BlueHost allowed one site to have hundreds of thousands of files then potentially that one site is doubling )or more) the time it will take to recover the server from problems and so getting rid of that one site increases the value of the hosting substantially for all the other sites.

I don't think the file limit applied back in Jan 2008, It is only since then that BlueHost discovered that some boxes take seversal days to recover from a crash due to the huge number of files on one account on the box (where if it were not for that one account the box would be back up in hours at most). So that one site was costing the hundereds of other sites days of unwanted downtime. By restrictiing the number of files BlueHost ensure that one site doesn't cause such problems. BlueHost are being fair with those sites by starting with the largest ones and asking the owners to gradually reduce the number of files they have.

If you have that many files then you should be using dedicated hosting where your site can't cause other sites to be down for days unnecessarily.