Inodes, entry processes, CPU seconds, I/O throttling and monthly visit caps — the real constraints on a plan advertised as having none.
Unlimited storage. Unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited websites. All of it is bounded, and the bounds are in the terms of service rather than the pricing table. None of this is fraud exactly — the limits are usually generous enough that ordinary sites never touch them — but knowing which ones exist explains most of the mysterious behaviour of cheap hosting.
Inodes: the limit that catches people
An inode is a filesystem entry — one file or one directory. Shared hosts cap them, commonly between 100,000 and 500,000, because backup systems care far more about file count than total size.
A fresh WordPress install is roughly 2,000 inodes. That sounds like enormous headroom until you notice what accumulates: a caching plugin generating a file per page variant, an image optimiser keeping five resized copies of every upload, a backup plugin storing archives inside wp-content, and an email account with 40,000 messages sitting in the same quota. Hitting the inode limit usually presents as "cannot write file" errors and a site that has mysteriously stopped working, with plenty of disk space free.
Entry processes: the invisible concurrency cap
The one that actually throttles you. An "entry process" is one PHP request being served at that instant, and shared plans typically allow between 10 and 40. It is not a limit on visitors per day — it is a limit on simultaneous requests.
A page-cached brochure site serves most visitors from static files and barely touches PHP. An uncached WooCommerce site with logged-in users can exhaust twenty entry processes with a couple of dozen concurrent shoppers, at which point additional visitors receive a 508 "resource limit reached" error. Same traffic figure, entirely different outcome, decided by whether caching works.
CPU seconds and I/O
Shared accounts get a CPU allowance measured in seconds per period and an I/O throughput cap, typically 1–10 MB/s. Exceed either and you are throttled rather than cut off — the site does not break, it just goes slowly, intermittently, for reasons nothing in your own dashboard explains. This is the single most common cause of "my host is randomly slow" and it is why the diagnosis requires the host's resource-usage graphs, which good hosts expose in the panel and cheap ones do not.
Monthly visit caps
Managed WordPress hosting replaces the unlimited framing with an explicit one: SiteGround, Kinsta and WP Engine all sell plans by monthly visits, and exceeding the allowance triggers overage charges or a forced upgrade. This is more honest and occasionally more expensive — a post that goes unexpectedly viral produces a bill as well as traffic.
Watch how "visits" is defined. Bots, uptime monitors and preview crawlers may or may not count, and on some platforms they historically did.
Where to find the real numbers
- The terms of service or acceptable use policy, not the pricing page. Search the page for "inode", "entry process", "CPU" and "excessive".
- In cPanel, look for "Resource Usage" — it shows faults against each limit over the past 24 hours and is the fastest way to diagnose intermittent slowness.
- Ask pre-sales directly: "what is the inode limit and the entry process limit on this plan?" A host that answers plainly is telling you something about itself. A host that says "it's unlimited" is telling you something too.
Which hosts are straight about it
20i genuinely does allow unlimited websites on ordinary shared plans, which is unusual and one of its better features — the constraint is platform-level resource use rather than a site count. Krystal publishes tiered plans with stated limits rather than an unlimited claim, which is the more honest structure even though it reads as less generous. Cloudways sidesteps the question entirely: you rent a server of a known size, and the limits are simply that server's RAM and CPU.
The practical takeaway: "unlimited" is a marketing word meaning "more than a typical customer uses". If you are a typical customer, it is fine. If you are hitting limits, the fix is almost always page caching and deleting accumulated junk before it is a bigger plan — and if you genuinely need concurrency, a small VPS with known specifications beats an unlimited plan with unknown ones.
Published 25 July 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.