Understanding your hosting plan's resource limits

Every hosting plan has limits. Some are obvious (disk space). Others are less obvious but matter more (concurrent processes, inodes). This article explains what each one means and when it actually matters.

Storage (NVMe disk)

The headline number. 3 GB on Starter, 6 GB on Standard, 7 GB on Business, scaling up from there. Two notes:

• It’s not just your files. Your storage quota includes the database, all email mailboxes, log files, and any backups stored on the server. A 5 GB site with 10 GB of mailbox history will hit limits faster than you’d think.
• NVMe matters. Every plan uses NVMe SSDs, which is roughly 5-10× faster than older SATA SSDs for the read patterns websites generate. This is one reason our Standard plan outperforms cheaper hosts’ “premium” tiers.

When you’re at 80% of quota, we email you. At 95%, things start to break — most commonly, MySQL can’t write to the database log, so dynamic pages fail.

Inodes (file count)

An inode is, roughly, one filesystem entry — each file or folder counts as one. Why does anyone care? Because some sites accumulate huge numbers of small files (WordPress cache plugins are the worst offenders) without using much actual disk space.

Inode limits vary by plan but are generous. The two situations that cause problems:

1. Cache plugins generating millions of files. WP Super Cache and similar can spawn 500,000 cached files for a 5,000-page site. Most plans handle this fine, but if you see “disk full” errors when df reports only 30% used, this is why.
2. Email accumulation. A mailbox with 100,000 messages eats 100,000 inodes. We don’t auto-delete; if you hit limits, archive old mail.

If you’re getting “out of disk” errors but storage shows fine, open a ticket — we’ll check inode usage.

CPU and RAM (entry processes / concurrent connections)

This is where shared hosting myths live. Specifically: shared plans don’t give you a fixed “CPU percentage” — they give you a slice of a shared pool with limits on:

• Entry processes: how many simultaneous PHP requests can be in flight from your account. Starter/Standard: lower. Business and above: higher, with isolated PHP-FPM worker pools.
• CPU time: how much CPU your account can burn per minute averaged.
• RAM per process: how much memory each PHP worker can use before being killed.

In practice this means: a normal WordPress site serving 100 visitors an hour never hits these limits. A site getting a sudden traffic spike from a viral social media post might. WooCommerce on a cheap plan during a sale day definitely will.

Signs you’re hitting CPU/RAM limits:

• “503 Service Unavailable” errors during traffic peaks
• Specific admin pages timing out (often heavy plugins)
• Site fast at 2am, slow at 11am

The solution is usually: optimise (caching, fewer plugins) or upgrade. If you’re consistently hitting limits on Standard, Business is sized for that load.

Bandwidth

We don’t publish a hard monthly bandwidth limit because for 99% of customers it’s a non-issue. We monitor for abuse — if your single account is doing 10 TB/month of outbound, we’ll have a conversation — but a normal small business website never gets near anything we’d flag.

This is different from some competitors who advertise “unlimited bandwidth” then throttle after a certain volume. We don’t throttle; if you’re using legitimately a lot, we’ll talk about whether you should be on a different tier or a VPS.

Email sending limits

To prevent spam abuse, we cap outbound email at 30 messages per hour per account. This is way more than any normal small business sends manually — but it’s a hard ceiling for bulk mailers.

If you need to send newsletters, abandoned cart sequences, or transactional volume above this, don’t use your hosting account’s SMTP. Use a dedicated transactional service like Postmark, Mailgun, SendGrid, or AWS SES. They have proper IP reputation management and your deliverability will be much better anyway.

What’s not a hard limit

• Number of websites: all plans support multiple add-on domains. Standard typically handles 5 small sites comfortably.
• Number of subdomains: create as many as you like.
• Database count: unlimited MySQL databases (within storage).
• FTP accounts: create as many as you need for collaborators.

When to upgrade

Honest signs you’ve outgrown your current plan:

• Storage routinely above 80%
• 503 errors during normal traffic patterns
• WordPress admin slowness despite a clean install
• WooCommerce store doing >50 orders/week on a shared plan

The path is usually: Starter → Standard for growth → Business when traffic is sustained → E-commerce when you’re running a real store. We can move you between tiers without downtime — open a ticket.