I have been using Hostmonster for more than 2 years, and I was quite satisfied until now. When I registered in 2006, Hostmonster gives more than enough disk space, and bandwidth for me. Few months ago, I decided to extend my registration for another 3 years, I am doing this because the uptime of the server is excellent, and they are responsive to questions and requests (such as adding DNS record, or resolving some problem with CPanel).
Three days ago, I got an email from abuse department, it says that I have been storing to many files. I have about 300 thousands files, and their limit (that they just set on May) is 50 thousands file. You may think that 50 thousands file is a lot, but in reality it is not. Many software uses thousands of small files, for example there are more than 1800 files on gallery2 (typical install, english only), there are more than 1000 files for wordpress. Joomla with virtuemart will use more than 6000 files. I think this new limit has something to do with their new UNLIMITED HOSTING offer.
That is only the default install. Many web applications uses more files. For example, gallery2 will cache the resized sizes (thumnail, normal view, full view, etc) so if you upload 1000 pictures, it may end up becoming 3000 files or more. I got quite many blog entries (because I have been blogging in my Indonesian blog for 3 years), so I need to install wp-cache to speed things up. The cache is file based, so in just one of my blog, I use about around 4000 files.
The worst part is Hostmonster also counts their configuration files, empty directories, log files, and emails in the total. So if you have several email account, and you haven’t pop your email for a while, your file count will be high. If you use IMAP, then you can not have many messages, because every message is a file.
After cleaning up my files, removing my photos, uninstalling gallery, I finally lowered down my file count to around 44000. Now I only use about 1.7 GB of the disk space. So much for unlimited space hosting 🙁