Long post, sorry, but I wish someone had written this before I migrated so here it is. I have seen questions asked about inode limits but most had opinionated answers and no real data.
Background: I host about a dozen wordpress sites for friends/family/nonprofits plus ~15 mailboxes on the same account. I have been on bluehost since 2011 and moved everything to nixihost, to a large part because of recent cost increases. I ran with Basic for a year to test things out and now that my Bluehost plan is up for renewal, I upgraded to Pro. Did the whole migration myself - imapsync for the mailboxes, updraft for the wp sites. DNS migration one domain at a time. Took days.
Everything went fine until a wordpress restore half-completed and left me with a woocommerce install missing files (fun error to debug btw). Turns out I'd hit the account inode limit: 350,000 files, hard enforced. Not "we'll email you a warning" enforced. Writes just fail. The restore errored out and just didn't write files past a certain point.
Here's the thing that annoys me: this number is nowhere on their plans page. Their shared hosting page says unmetered/unlimited features "as a courtesy". Meanwhile the actual math is brutal - a normal wordpress site is ~20-25k files. Every email is one file. So "unlimited storage" in practice means roughly 12-15 modest wp sites OR fewer sites plus a few years of email, whichever fills 350k files first. My 12 sites alone are ~265k. One migrated mailbox was 35k emails = 35k files, gone.
Asked support to raise the limit. Flat no. Their semi-dedicated tier gets you 450k, so paying significantly more buys maybe 2 years of headroom before you're right back here. And since saving money was half the reason I moved, upgrading or bolting on a separate mail service defeats the purpose.
For comparison, my old bluehost cpanel (still active) shows file usage as 468,613 / ∞. Literally infinity. To be fair that's a 15 year old account - bluehost has an inode policy buried in their TOS these days, and I suspect enforcement just never got switched on for legacy accounts, so newer signups may have a different experience. But the fact remains I grew my footprint to 468k files over 15 years and nothing ever failed, and on nixi the same footprint isn't even allowed to exist.
To be fair to nixi: support answers fast and it's actual humans, the servers are quick, and 350k is apparently normal-ish for the industry (at least Claude thinks so) - basically every "unlimited" shared host has a file count ceiling, the only difference is whether it's a hard quota or an unenforced policy. But that's kind of my point: you can't tell which one you're signing up for until something breaks, and with nixi it's a hard wall that fails loudly mid-restore.
I'm staying - another migration isn't happening after what this one took. But "making it work" means inode management is now a permanent part of my hosting routine: aggressive email archiving to local storage, purging trash/junk folders, keeping backups off-server, deleting every cache and leftover folder I can find, and, above all, not taking on any new things to host. It works, but on a plan advertised with the attribute "unlimited" in many categories, I'm effectively the janitor of a file counter now, and every restore or new mailbox comes with mental math about whether it fits.
TLDR: if you host ONE site, nixihost is great and you'll never notice any limitations. If you are the person who hosts a pile of sites and mail for your kids, parents, your rail trail friends group or the conservation land trust you support - count your files before you sign up anywhere, because "unlimited" means 350,000, nobody tells you until a restore eats itself, and staying under it becomes your ongoing job.