I built a small website myself using Opencart some years ago to sell specialist parts for old motorcycles and it's always gone well even though it makes hardly any money. I have a very small audience, which suits me as I am retired and recently my health has not been good.
My ISP now wants me to move from a cloud based panel to cpanel but says that because I have about 350,000 inodes they want to move me to a considerably pricier plan. I started looking at the site's files using Filezilla and then PuTTY but they were the wrong tools. They advised me as follows:
Quote"If you are running on a Windows 10 operating system, you could alternatively install "Ubuntu 20.04 LTS" via the Microsoft Store and when you run it you will directly have an Ubuntu terminal installed on your computer which supports all the necessary commands, including the very common and popular df and du you mentioned about. It is much more powerful tool than PuTTy SSH client is.
Then you could also check the following external guide (for example) for reference on how to gain information about the inodes used, once connected to the server: https://www.2daygeek.com/linux-check-count-inode-usage/ We don't use anything specific. For example the following should display all the files in the current directory and the below directories as well:
Code:
find . -printf "%h\n" | cut -d/ -f-2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn"
(end of quotation)
I have a W10 desktop so I loaded Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and I logged on to their server with
Code:ssh <username they gave me>@<their server name>and gave the password, and found myself logged in to a terminal interface.
I tried a pwd command which gave the expected answer (judged from the directory tree that Filezilla has always shown me) and then a du command which also worked. For some reason, the df command was not available to me. Does that mean it's not available on their server?
I then cut and pasted their find command from the message they sent me, after which nothing further happened. Expecting that the command might take a while to run if there was indeed 350,000 inodes, I let it run for an hour, when the command prompt had not reappeared.
I then found I could not terminate the command (I tried ctrl C and ctrl Z) or in any way do anything, the session was hung. I had to close the Ubuntu window.
I have Googled loads of pages trying to see what to do but the typicsl advice seems to be to install the particular software that the advice-giver is using.
I have downloaded the total contents of the website to my local machine using Filezilla (the trees below mysql_backups and public_html) and I'm contemplating deleting the whole site and then reloading it from the backups and seeing if that would a) work, and b) get rid of many inodes. Would that be a sensible thing to try? Would the site still work?
Some details of the website's files after the download to the Windows machine are:
Total size on disk 30.5MB, number of files 3,042, and 255 directories. That's hardly large surely?
All email associated with this site has used POP3 (nothing stored on mail servers) and my ISP has told me that the inodes are not linked to email. They are not telling me where the inodes are though.
So where could the inodes be?
I really am stuck and if push comes to shove I may have to decide to close down the website because I cannot justify the increased costs that I would have to bear if the inode problem is not resolved.
I would really welcome advice on tackling this problem. Thanks.