Hosting Resource Limits Explained: CPU, Entry Processes, Inodes and More

Every shared hosting plan comes with a list of limits, and most buyers read only the first two: storage and bandwidth. The limits that actually decide whether your site loads quickly at 9 PM on a Sunday are further down the list, usually labelled CPU, entry processes and inodes. This guide explains what each one means, when you will hit it, and what happens when you do, using the real numbers from our four plans.

Why shared hosting has limits at all

A shared server hosts many accounts on one machine. Without limits, a single site with a runaway plugin or a bot attack could consume the whole CPU and slow every other customer down. Limits are how the host guarantees each account a fair slice. Read this way, a clearly published limit is a good sign: it tells you what you are actually buying.

The limits fall into two groups. Capacity limits (storage, bandwidth, inodes, databases, domains) are about how much you can store and serve over a month. Performance limits (CPU share, entry processes) are about how much work the server will do for you at any single moment. Capacity limits fill up slowly and give warnings; performance limits are hit in bursts and cause errors.

Our four plans side by side

The table below lists the published limits on each ProWebHosting plan so you can see how they scale. All four run on DirectAdmin, on servers in Europe, with free SSL, email and a one-click WordPress installer included. Full details are on the hosting plans page.

Storage and inodes: how much you can keep

Storage is the total disk space your account may use. It covers website files, uploaded images, databases and every email stored on the server. For a WordPress business site, the images in the media library are usually the biggest item, followed by email. A fresh WordPress install with a theme and a handful of plugins is well under 100 MB; it is the photos that grow.

On the Promotional plan, 5 GB comfortably holds a brochure site, a blog with a few hundred posts and modest email use. Move to 10 GB on Advanced when you host several sites or keep years of email on the server. The 50 GB on Professional suits agencies with many client sites or a store with thousands of product photos. Emails are the usual surprise: clearing old mail or using IMAP with local archiving frees more space than deleting plugins.

Inodes are a separate count. An inode is one file or folder on disk, regardless of size. A hosting account with 200,000 tiny cache files uses 200,000 inodes even if they add up to a few hundred megabytes. Most shared hosts cap inodes per account, and a site can run out of inodes with plenty of storage left. The common causes are caching plugins that never clean up, image plugins that generate a dozen sizes of every upload, and email folders with tens of thousands of messages.

Bandwidth: how much you can serve each month

Bandwidth, sometimes called data transfer, is the total amount of data sent from your account to visitors in a month. It resets each month. A page that weighs 2 MB viewed 10,000 times uses about 20 GB. Text-heavy pages weigh far less; pages with large uncompressed photos or embedded video files weigh far more.

The 100 GB on the Promotional plan is ample for a small business site with a few thousand visits a month. The 500 GB and 2,000 GB tiers on Advanced and Professional exist for portfolios of sites and for stores whose product pages carry many images. If you host downloadable files such as PDF brochures or software, count those separately, since one 50 MB file downloaded 2,000 times is 100 GB on its own. Video should be hosted on YouTube or a similar service and embedded, not uploaded to shared hosting.

CPU share: how much processing power you get

CPU share is expressed as a percentage of one virtual CPU core. 25% means your account may use up to a quarter of one core's time; 100% means a full core. This is the limit that most directly decides how fast a PHP page is generated. When your account is at its CPU ceiling, requests are not refused, they queue and each one takes longer, so the site feels sluggish rather than broken.

What consumes CPU is not visitors as such but uncached PHP work. A well-cached WordPress site serves most visitors a stored HTML copy and barely touches PHP. The same site with no caching plugin, a heavy page-builder theme and thirty plugins runs PHP and database queries for every single visit. That is why a site can feel slow on a plan with a generous CPU share and fast on a smaller one. Our guide to website speed covers caching in detail.

• 25% of a core (Promotional): one cached WordPress site, a landing page, a portfolio or a small blog.
• 50% of a core (Advanced): a few WordPress sites, a small WooCommerce store with caching, or a site with regular traffic bursts.
• 75% of a core (Professional): an agency account with multiple active client sites, or a store with logged-in customers whose pages cannot be cached.
• 100% of a core (Business): several busy sites, membership or learning sites where most pages are personalised, or heavy background jobs such as large imports.

Entry processes: how many requests at the same instant

Entry processes count how many requests your account is handling at exactly the same moment. Each PHP page being generated, each cron job running and each active SSH or script session is one entry process. When it finishes, usually within a fraction of a second, the slot is released. A limit of 15 does not mean 15 visitors; it means 15 things happening in the same instant.

Because normal requests complete quickly, a site with a few thousand visits a day rarely has more than two or three entry processes open at once. The limit is reached in three situations: a traffic spike where many people arrive in the same second, a bot or scanner firing dozens of requests at once, or a slow script that holds each process open for several seconds so they pile up. When the limit is exceeded, extra visitors see an error page, commonly a 508 Resource Limit Is Reached message, until a slot frees up.

Our plans move from 15 entry processes on Promotional to 25, 35 and 45 on Advanced, Professional and Business. Caching does more to protect this limit than any upgrade, because a cached page is served without opening a PHP process at all. If you keep hitting the limit with caching in place, the usual culprit is a plugin making slow external requests or a login page being hammered by bots, both of which are fixable without changing plans.

Databases, domains and the rest

Each application you install normally needs its own MySQL database: one per WordPress site, one per Laravel app. Promotional includes 5, Advanced 15, Professional 25 and Business unlimited, so the database count rarely limits you before the addon domain count does. Addon domains control how many separate websites you can host on one account; the Promotional plan is deliberately a one-site plan with no addon domains, and Advanced starts at 5 addon domains and 5 subdomains.

Frequently asked questions