cPanel backups impossible if >4GB or >50,000 Inodes?

[mailint]

I can't do cPanel backups with Hostgator because of one of these errors:

[ ! ] WARNING: Your account is TOO LARGE (Over 4gb) for cPanel backups. Please contact support. [ ! ]

[ ! ] WARNING: Your account is TOO LARGE (Over 50,000 Inodes) for cPanel backups. Please contact support. [ ! ]

Is it a limitation of cPanel?
What can I do to overcome this limitation?

[zigzam]

Looks like a limitation of Hostgator.

[cpanelkenneth]

This is not something we've implemented. You'll need to address your concerns to HostGator.

[jasonhk]

It's a hostgator limit:

http://www.hostgator.com/tos.shtml

7b.) INODES
The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in a warning first, and if no action is taken future suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 50,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over-usage. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.

Sites that slightly exceed our inode limits are unlikely to be suspended; however, accounts that constantly create and delete large numbers of files on a regular basis, have hundreds of thousands of files, or cause file system damage may be flagged for review and/or suspension. The primary cause of excessive inodes seems to be due to users leaving their catchall address enabled, but never checking their primary account mailbox. Over time, tens of thousands of messages (or more) build up, eventually pushing the account past our inode limit. To disable your default mailbox, login to cPanel and choose "Mail", then "Default Address", "Set Default Address", and then type in: :fail: No such user here.

7c.) Backup Limit
Any shared account using more than 20 gigs of disk space will be removed from our off site weekly backup with the the exception of Databases continuing to be backed up. All data will continue to be mirrored to a secondary drive which helps protect against data loss in the event of a drive failure.

[exdiogene]

First, i have to precise that the TOS article 7b) and 7c) are only about HostGator automated Weekly backups, not the users manual backups.

Anyway, it seem that HostGator is also limiting the users own backups.

The HostGator response to this is that it is cPanel that crash their servers when backing up more than 50000 inodes. Read their response here :

The reason is actually a limitation in cPanel. Instead of a "momentary" load this was actually crashing servers. You can still perform your own backups, you just can't use cPanels packaging script.

I am eager to know the cPanel technical response to that...

[cPanelDavidG]

First, i have to precise that the TOS article 7b) and 7c) are only about HostGator automated Weekly backups, not the users manual backups.

Anyway, it seem that HostGator is also limiting the users own backups.

The HostGator response to this is that it is cPanel that crash their servers when backing up more than 50000 inodes. Read their response here :



I am eager to know the cPanel technical response to that...

I have spoken to our Quality Assurance folks who specifically work on that functionality as well as our technical analysts and none of them have encountered the issue HostGator claims to be encountering with cPanel/WHM.

Additionally, our backup system runs at nice +19, meaning virtually all other processes on the server will execute before the next instruction for the backup is executed. This makes it extremely difficult for the backup system to overwhelm the cPanel/WHM server.

[exdiogene]

This is what a HostGator Level 3 admin had to say about your answer :

"This makes it extremely difficult for the backup system to overwhelm the cPanel/WHM server."

That statement is relative when you have thousands of servers with hundreds of thousands of clients. Some having millions of files to archive, some having databases ranging up to 10gb.

For anyone with technical expertise in shared hosting, this should have been easily deduced by drawing a logical conclusion based on my previous reply.

Even with the process niced and even ionice'd (which we tried) sometimes the gzip / sql dump sections of packaging the account causes the load on our servers to reach alarmingly high levels that degrade the quality of service for other users. And that's why these limits are in place.

As an example say we have 5 users having each in their accounts :

- 100,000 files with a total size before compression of 750MB
- One database of 250MB

Do you really believe that if these 5 users decide to do their own backups of 1GB before compression at the same time, it wont be harmfull to a shared accounts server with 4 CPUs and 8GB of memory?

[cPanelDavidG]

This is what a HostGator Level 3 admin had to say about your answer :



As an example say we have 5 users having each in their accounts :

- 100,000 files with a total size before compression of 750MB
- One database of 250MB

Do you really believe that if these 5 users decide to do their own backups of 1GB before compression at the same time, it wont be harmfull to a shared accounts server with 4 CPUs and 8GB of memory?

We have many customers that do backups of accounts with 30+ Gigabytes of content. While these backups do take a while to generate, they do not use sufficient resources at a single time to bring a modern server (such as one you mention) to a crashed/hung state in our experience and testing.

Last week we had a customer on an old single-core system with 512 megs of RAM backing up over 25 Gigs of data from the whole server - but even such a low-powered system remained online, just operating slower than it normally would.

However, I can only speak for default cPanel/WHM installs, configurations options made possible by cPanel/WHM itself and the backup scripts we use as part of our migration automation. If significant custom modifications have been performed to servers running our software (e.g. by means of custom shell scripting), that potentially could interfere with our software performing in its intended fashion.

As for your specific scenario of 5 users pressing the full server backup simultaneously on a server with contemporary hardware - as all 5 processes would run at nice 19, it should not bring down the server. I've started up to 7 full site backup processes on a shared server with similar specifications (the 4 CPUs were each dual-core) without even slightly affecting server performance.

However, if you're worried about such a scenario, you may consider encouraging users do download their own system backups instead of generating new backups. Users can do this by going to the Backup section of their cPanel interface and select the "daily" backup under the "System Backups" section near the top of the screen. This only works if you have system backups enabled.

[Infopro]

Looks like a limitation of Hostgator.

Unlimited disk space hosting with limits on disk space? Go figure.

[mohit]

a Nice feature integrated with Unlimited Hosts,
A friendly suggestion, start backing up on own today before your loose everything, cause your host may not backup and will be hiding behind what their TOS says, not to mention you must have agreed while signing up.

[bodhost.com]

Well, that's the issue with most hosting companies. They don't offer what they mention on the website. There's always a catch with these providers even though their branding is quite impressive in the market, but yet lack what the customer requires.
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[MN-Robert]

I'll have to disagree with you David. We've had to disable it also as large accounts were hogging IO for hours sometimes. We do provide R1soft now and don't have the same issues.

[cPanelDavidG]

I'll have to disagree with you David. We've had to disable it also as large accounts were hogging IO for hours sometimes. We do provide R1soft now and don't have the same issues.

Anyone encounters these issues on 11.23 or later, please submit a support ticket so we can take a look at things: http://tickets.cPanel.net/submit

If you are experiencing these issues on an older version of cPanel, upgrading will likely resolve the issue.

[exdiogene]

David,

i never had received any other response from HostGator after posting your reply.

Their version of cPanel is always the last one, now it is 11.24.4-RELEASE 36167.

So i wonder why they still refuse to allow their 1,800,000 domains to backup their sites when they reach the critical 50,000 inodes point even if these inodes have a total size under 500MB.

[MN-Robert]

You should consider changing hosts if their Inode limit is affecting you.