More RAM is nice, but more disk would be MUCH NICER
However, I have been with Linode since 2003 (well, there was a 3 year period in there where I went to another vendor who had much better system specs on a dedicated system but much, much worse support, and I returned to Linode), and there is one thing which, in this entire time, has been a problem for me and which, despite my hopes that it will get better, has only gotten worse and worse.
That problem is disk space. Disk space very, very rarely goes up on the Linode plans. I was kind of unhappy about the disk space available when I signed up with Linode in 2003. What I did not expect is that it would only get worse and worse over time.
What I mean by that is, the cost of a Linode compared to the market cost of disk space has gotten higher and higher over time. Of course I realize that Linode disk space will always cost more than the raw cost of hard drives, and I don't mind paying a premium for the disk space.
In August 2003, when Linode first started, hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte. Today they cost around 10 cents per gigabyte. That means that the raw cost of hard drive space has gone down by a factor of 200 in that time.
If Linode matched this same rate, then the 1 GB of space originally offered for $20 per month would now yield 200 GB of space for the same price.
Instead, we have only 16 GB for $20 per month.
Thus, Linode has failed to match the market cost of disk space by a factor of more than 10x over that time period. In other words, Linode disk space is now 10x more expensive than it was in 2003, relative to the raw cost of hard drive space.
Now I'm not saying that Linode hard drive space should cost ten cents per gigabyte-year. I'll be generous and allow Linode a 10x markup on the cost of hard drives. I'll happily pay $1 per gigabyte-year on my Linode. That will be $5 per month for an additional 60 GB of space in my Linode, and I would really be quite happy with that.
I know that it is difficult to fit hard drive space in Linodes. But Linodes have been at roughly the same density for years now and the density of hard drives has increased tremendously in that time. Why can't more dense drives be put into Linodes than were put in 5 or 6 years ago?
It's become a real pain for me to host my personal site on Linode. 24 GB just isn't alot of room for all of the accumulated emails of my family, and for my photos and videos, and my archived data, and all of the stuff that I want to keep there. Just a week or two ago I hit 100% and had to go clean out stuff that I would have rather kept on my Linode, but had no where to put it. Sure, I could probably scrimp around to find more files that I could remove and give myself more headroom but, should I really need to do that? Should I really be trying to cram all of my content into 24 GB at $30 per month? It is, quite honestly, preposterous.
It is only because Linode does have very good service and support that I stay. But I feel like I am being stuck between a rock and a hard place; I don't want to leave Linode because I don't want to deal with less reputable hosting sites. But I almost can't stay because the hard disk space is so pitiful. So what ends up happening is I have to juggle and play games with my disk space and files just to fight to stay on Linode. And I feel like I shouldn't have to.
So yay for more RAM, that is great. But my god, will you PLEASE address the hard drive space issue? If you search the forums you'll find that I've pointed this out periodically over the years and nothing has ever improved on this front! (Yes, I know, we have gotten disk size increases, but the fact that Linode continues to fall further and further behind on the comparison to raw hard disk prices has not changed; if anything, it has accelerated over time).
64 Replies
Although I do agree with what your saying on the pricing. Have you taken into account RAID, since I think linode runs RAID10 or something like that?
@jords:
Disk isn't a problem for me, i use about 4gb on one of my linodes (with 16gb space) and 2gb on another (with 24gb space).
Although I do agree with what your saying on the pricing. Have you taken into account RAID, since I think linode runs RAID10 or something like that?
I believe they've always run that way; so whatever markup was sufficient in 2003 ought to be sufficient now, and we still arrive at a 10x (or more) disparity in price versus available space.
@bji:
In August 2003, when Linode first started, hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte. Today they cost around 10 cents per gigabyte. That means that the raw cost of hard drive space has gone down by a factor of 200 in that time.
Ummm, $2.00 / $0.10 = 20, not 200.
> If Linode matched this same rate, then the 1 GB of space originally offered for $20 per month would now yield
Instead, we have only 16 GB for $20 per month.
Doesn't seem like they are all that far off your expectations.
In effect, you'd get our 16GB of very fast local storage for your $20/mth included, and you could perhaps pay $10/mth to get 100GB of storage on the SAN at lower speeds for bulk storage. The downside of this is that it might make the NICs of the host boxes a bottleneck.
As far as we know, Linode puts four disks into each host in RAID-10, and they're 15K RPM SAS disks. The biggest such drives are, I believe, 600GB, so you'd get a max of 1200GB post-RAID per host machine.
If there are 40x512s on a box, and each has 16GB of storage, that means your requirements are 640GB.
So it looks like Linode could afford to upgrade the 512s to 24GB without much issue (assuming that they had 600GB disks in them), but not really much more. That's not a big increase.
I think you'll find that the reason that Linode's competition offer much more storage space is that they use cheap big 7200RPM drives, while Linode uses high-end 15K RPM drives. It's a quantity vs quality thing.
@Guspaz:
In effect, you'd get our 16GB of very fast local storage for your $20/mth included, and you could perhaps pay $10/mth to get 100GB of storage on the SAN at lower speeds for bulk storage. The downside of this is that it might make the NICs of the host boxes a bottleneck.
NAS would load the NICs, SAN wouldn't…
@glg:
NAS would load the NICs, SAN wouldn't…
SAN could if they went iSCSI and did not get cards dedicated for storage. SAN does not necessarily imply FibreChannel anymore.
@jax:
@glg:NAS would load the NICs, SAN wouldn't…
SAN could if they went iSCSI and did not get cards dedicated for storage. SAN does not necessarily imply FibreChannel anymore.
pfft. if it's iscsi, then it's NAS. Calling something going over the NIC SAN is like calling something running OpenVZ a VPS.
@glg:
pfft. if it's iscsi, then it's NAS. Calling something going over the NIC SAN is like calling something running OpenVZ a VPS.
Fiber channel may have the performance edge, but as long as the storage is accessed as a raw block device, I think it's more appropriate to use SAN than NAS. NAS implies file sharing protocols are used to access the data at a higher level than a block device.
Both Fiber Channel Protocol and iSCSI map SCSI operations to a remote device, so are very analogous - not to mention that FCP is also used over 10Gbps ethernet.
I do think some SAN storage as an add-on option would be interesting, though not as primary storage, and even if it's a performance hit compared to local storage, doing it over ethernet is probably much easier to retrofit.
For most of my nodes, disk space isn't a major issue, but when it is, having local expansion over SAN would likely work fine. Though I do think the potential impact on the private network would need to be taken into consideration, I bet it would work pretty well.
I think it's come up here on the boards before too, but I wonder if Linode couldn't just re-purpose or just dedicate some hosts to be iSCSI targets, rather than having to invest in and manage separate SAN devices. Might even fit more easily into whatever internal tools they have for managing space.
– David
@Stever:
@bji:In August 2003, when Linode first started, hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte. Today they cost around 10 cents per gigabyte. That means that the raw cost of hard drive space has gone down by a factor of 200 in that time.
Ummm, $2.00 / $0.10 = 20, not 200.
> If Linode matched this same rate, then the 1 GB of space originally offered for $20 per month would now yield20 GB of space for the same price.Instead, we have only 16 GB for $20 per month.
Doesn't seem like they are all that far off your expectations.
Gah, you're right. Something did seem pretty unexpected about those numbers when I wrote them, but it was late and, I'm kind of bad at math.
I hope my math error does not invalidate my complaint. It's still hard to believe that $30 * 12 months = $360 only buys 24 GB of disk space per year.
The content on my Linode does not grow at an unreasonabe rate; and yet I find that year after year I get closer to maxing out my space because Linode disks just don't get bigger very fast. Now I've finally hit the point where without significant effort, I am running out of space.
I'm just trying to make my voice heard here; I'm a customer and I have what I think are not unreasonable requirements; and if Linode doesn't add more disk space soon, I will have to leave, not because I want to, but because I have to. I'll probably just get out of hosting my own site altogether, move my family over to gmail, put my photos onto some free hosting site, and buy a cheap $5/month shell account just to use for those rare occasions when I need a server in the sky to test something.
A typical 15000 RPM, 600 GB, hot-swappable, 5-year warranty SAS drive continues to be about $500, so mirrored high-speed local storage is somewhere around $1.67/GB, excluding controllers, power, sleds, and replacement costs. Eventually, I expect drives will get larger as storage scientists can figure out ways to embiggen them without catching fire or decreasing MTBF.
If you don't mind paying a premium for the Linode storage - upgrade. If you can't afford it - move something off. Maybe move your email to Gmail, move the infrequent content to some other respectable service which is fairly cheap like Amazon S3, or move it to another place which massively oversells like Dreamhost.
@hoopycat:
You could move the data off to S3, you know. Cold storage is pretty cheap there… $0.15/GB/mo, or $0.10/GB/mo if you like to live life on the edge a bit. If you're just archiving photos and such there and don't access it frequently, it's probably a win. $2.40/mo will store your 24 GB of photos with decent availability.
A typical 15000 RPM, 600 GB, hot-swappable, 5-year warranty SAS drive continues to be about $500, so mirrored high-speed local storage is somewhere around $1.67/GB, excluding controllers, power, sleds, and replacement costs. Eventually, I expect drives will get larger as storage scientists can figure out ways to embiggen them without catching fire or decreasing MTBF.
I have already moved all of my archived data onto S3. My Linode has mostly just emails and my Gallery site taking up most of the space. The Gallery site is the biggest user by far. My wife doesn't want to be constrained in the number of photos and movies that she can put up, and within reason, I don't think she should have to be.
I have thought about making a really good S3 bucket mounting filesystem for Linux. Then I could have lots of cheap off-Linode storage, and use the local Linode hard drive as a file cache for the most frequently accessed files and as a write cache. There exists already tools for mounting S3 buckets as volumes but the last time I looked (admittedly, a couple of years ago) they were not nearly high quality enough for my required confidence level.
I actually started my own implementation thereof; but I ran out of steam and didn't finish it. I did produce a pretty good C interface to S3 (
Actually I suppose I could just use the money I made from that project to pay for Linode disk space and then I'd have nothing to complain about. At current Linode rates I could buy 50 GB of Linode storage per month for several years with that money. But I prefer to keep that money in my kids' college funds and have Linode suck it up and BUY SOME BIGGER DISKS!!!
@-Alex-:
I think you just need to remember the strengths/weaknesses of the service Linode provides. It's never going to give you the best value for money on storage space - they rely on fast drives which simply won't have as much storage.
> I think you missed the point. Linode storage is either more pricey than it could be or not; it's not about expecting Linode storage to be as cheap as a regular hard drive. It's about believing that Linode could provide more disk space but they are spending the money on something else. I would like to see them prioritize disk space more highly.If you don't mind paying a premium for the Linode storage - upgrade. If you can't afford it - move something off. Maybe move your email to Gmail, move the infrequent content to some other respectable service which is fairly cheap like Amazon S3, or move it to another place which massively oversells like Dreamhost.
I don't want to move. I like Linode in EVERY way EXCEPT for disk space.
@bji:
I have thought about making a really good S3 bucket mounting filesystem for Linux. Then I could have lots of cheap off-Linode storage, and use the local Linode hard drive as a file cache for the most frequently accessed files and as a write cache. (…)
I periodically think of trying to incorporate S3 for some aspects of my storage, but each time I look I conclude that it's not really all that cheap, once I take into account costs for actually performing updates. Though a much more static read-only long term storage would probably still be good.
BTW, you may already have seen this, but the last time I considered it again, I was intrigued by s3backer (
Of course, as a block device you may also risk heavier I/O charges compared to something that manages the S3 buckets differently, but there are some knobs to help with that as well.
– David
@bji:
But I prefer to keep that money in my kids' college funds and have Linode suck it up and BUY SOME BIGGER DISKS!!!
:x
I think the point we're trying to make, and that you're not quite getting, is that they don't make bigger disks. The release date on the 600 GB drive I mentioned was September 2009, so most of the drives out there are probably 300 or 450 GB.
Linode probably isn't going to spend $2000/server plus downtime to replace the disks in hundreds upon hundreds of servers with the same model of hard drive at the same time, either.
@hoopycat:
@bji:But I prefer to keep that money in my kids' college funds and have Linode suck it up and BUY SOME BIGGER DISKS!!!
:x I think the point we're trying to make, and that you're not quite getting, is that they don't make bigger disks. The release date on the 600 GB drive I mentioned was September 2009, so most of the drives out there are probably 300 or 450 GB.
Linode probably isn't going to spend $2000/server plus downtime to replace the disks in hundreds upon hundreds of servers with the same model of hard drive at the same time, either.
OK, then, I would also be happy with fast-ish local network storage, that someone else pointed out as a possibility. What is the reason that that couldn't be done?
@bji:
What is the reason that that couldn't be done?
Um…..money?
Although this thread has seen reasonable action for this forum, nobody else has chimed in with a "me too, I need more storage".
I don't think the average VPS/LINODE user needs mass storage, and for the few that do (like you), it's not worth the capital investment (and maintenance, and management, and monitoring, and accounting) for Linode to provide such a service.
If Linode thought they could make a profit, don't you think they'd already be discussing the Storage Rollout Plans?
@vonskippy:
@bji:What is the reason that that couldn't be done?
Um…..money?Although this thread has seen reasonable action for this forum, nobody else has chimed in with a "me too, I need more storage".
I don't think the average VPS/LINODE user needs mass storage, and for the few that do (like you), it's not worth the capital investment (and maintenance, and management, and monitoring, and accounting) for Linode to provide such a service.
If Linode thought they could make a profit, don't you think they'd already be discussing the Storage Rollout Plans?
I guess I never really thought of myself and my usage of Linode as not being part of the target market … I started my Linode in 2003 and I never really realized that its target audience grew into the group that you referenced.
So I guess that Linode may not, in fact, be ideally suited for me after all if that is the case. I am not sure what my alternatives are, though. Like I said, perhaps I should just get out of hosting my own stuff. "Vanity" web sites and photo galleries are pretty "2000's" I suppose in this day and age of Facebook and other social media sites. I guess I should just roll with the times and accept that hosting your own server just isn't as prevalent as it used to be.
Maybe you would be better off doing your mass storage somewhere that uses cheaper drives if performance isn't as much of an issue.
I think that says more about how technology has changed; my non-scientific gut-feeling is that memory prices have dropped quicker than disk.
However I do think linode need to be careful; 512Mb of RAM is a massive amount for $20/month. It's more than some real-colo solutions provided a couple of years ago! People might start expecting physical server type resources as a result, which is clearly wrong - it's just a virtual server. Expectation management is key to customer happiness and linode may raise false expectations by providing so much memory.
Not that I'm complaining
That being said, I'm tight on space on one of three Linodes and I'm starting to look into S3 to store less frequently accessed media files.
@vonskippy:
Although this thread has seen reasonable action for this forum, nobody else has chimed in with a "me too, I need more storage".
Eh, why not.
Me too, I need more storage (and I'm too cheap to purchase more!) :)
That said I too have looked into S3, and implemented Persistentfs mapping an S3 bucket back to my Linode, sym linking it as a directory.
Not a very efficient workaround, I have to account for bandwidth in and out and the resultant latency.
But it got me around a space issue for a download manager that I find a little bit perplexing (I'm using IPB Download manager for a hobby site) and doesn't make using a CDN easy for a fledgling php'er like me.
But the RAM upgrade is most welcome!
If they will give us more disk space by downgrading to 7200K I think that I will not be happy.
Think also that only 16Gb of disk space requires only 60$ for a 4 slots backup and this is another plus for me.
$0.02
@bji:
@Stever:
@bji:In August 2003, when Linode first started, hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte. Today they cost around 10 cents per gigabyte. That means that the raw cost of hard drive space has gone down by a factor of 200 in that time.
Ummm, $2.00 / $0.10 = 20, not 200.Doesn't seem like they are all that far off your expectations.
Gah, you're right. Something did seem pretty unexpected about those numbers when I wrote them, but it was late and, I'm kind of bad at math.
This. Maybe you could edit your first post to correct this and try to improve your argument. (I assume we can edit past posts here).
While the move from 1GB to 16GB in those years is good, I agree with you, BTW, that it would be good to have more disk space, provided that - given the elite RAID 10 and 15k etc hardware - I wouldn't want Linode to skimp in other areas, particularly customer service.
@bji:
I have thought about making a really good S3 bucket mounting filesystem for Linux. Then I could have lots of cheap off-Linode storage, and use the local Linode hard drive as a file cache for the most frequently accessed files and as a write cache. There exists already tools for mounting S3 buckets as volumes but the last time I looked (admittedly, a couple of years ago) they were not nearly high quality enough for my required confidence level.
You should check out s3backer
Edit: just noticed there was another page of posting where s3backer was already mentioned. Sorry.
@vonskippy:
Although this thread has seen reasonable action for this forum, nobody else has chimed in with a "me too, I need more storage".
Me too, I need more storage!
The RAM upgrade is nice, in the sense that it's better to have it than to not have it. Honestly, I don't expect to notice the difference.
I've also been a customer since summer 2003, straight through, and over the past couple of years, disk space has been a constant headache.
The last bump was over a year ago. I'm having to seriously consider moving to a dedicated server. I've found a place which offers one for $50/month, with 500GB disk space. Think of it!
Of course it's only a dual-core Atom, but what I need is DISK.
If you're using lucid (10.04 LTS), just:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rtucker/s3backer
Or, if you're using hardy (8.04 LTS), add this to your sources.list:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rtucker/s3backer/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/rtucker/s3backer/ubuntu hardy main
Once you've done either of the above, simply update and install as per usual:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install s3backer
You can then follow the nice instructions at this URL
No warranty, if it breaks you get to keep both halves, I may or may not update it if I hear of a new release, etc. I haven't actually done any performance testing with it yet, but I'm thinking of ways to do that.
I've heard reports of S3 being used for POSIX operations to be quite slow, although my experience from home with Dropbox (which is S3 backed) is pretty fast… Still, the whole "uses your bandwidth" thing is a bit of an issue.
@Guspaz:
I've heard reports of S3 being used for POSIX operations to be quite slow, although my experience from home with Dropbox (which is S3 backed) is pretty fast… Still, the whole "uses your bandwidth" thing is a bit of an issue.
You have to remember drop box keeps a copy of what you're syncing locally so it doesn't have to rely on contacting the s3 systems.
I use s3 for backup purposes only, it would work well as a CDN, but for a generic file system it is way too slow.
@caker:
We offer more disk. It's called: upgrade your plan.
Cheers,
-Chris
Sorry, I thought this was clear from the discussion but you seem to have missed it somehow.
I am asking for more space at the same price as what I pay now, or at a reasonable incremental increase in price. Your offer that I should pay an extra $10 per month for 6 GB of space is lame.
Believe me, I know that if I don't like the price, then I can go elsewhere; so no one has to remind me, thanks.
@bji:
Your offer that I should pay an extra $10 per month for 6 GB of space is lame.
Not to be constantly correcting your numbers, but if you upgrade plans your $10/mo gets you 8GB of disk space.
And if you don't like the price, oh nevermind…
@Stever:
@bji:Your offer that I should pay an extra $10 per month for 6 GB of space is lame.
Not to be constantly correcting your numbers, but if you upgrade plans your $10/mo gets you 8GB of disk space.And if you don't like the price, oh nevermind…
Thanks for the correction - I seem to be highly math impaired on these forums.
you could go with burst.net
I guess you get no support. At linode you are probably paying for support mostly.
@dmwilliams:
:idea: I guess linode just has to make a profit don't they?you could go with burst.net
Trolling much?
@dmwilliams:
I guess you get no support. At linode you are probably paying for support mostly.
And no overselling. If everyone fills up their 250 GB, there's gonna be trouble.
Disk is more like RAM - everybody allocate all he can even if he doesn't use it and thus it is expensive. I, for example would be able to live with 8G of 16G most of the time but it is not possible to resize image on fly so I have allocated whole 16G.
Chris' answer to this was pretty flip, IMO. No matter how-which-way you upgrade your Linode, you're paying between $1.25 to $2/month/gigabyte.
By contrast, other folks have figured out how to build storage for $.12/GB, one-time cost (plus maintenance & initial development):
After looking at setups like that, Linode's price/gig hurts a bit.
@thaumaturgy:
By contrast, other folks have figured out how to build storage for $.12/GB, one-time cost (plus maintenance & initial development):
~~[http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ " target="_blank"> ](http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/pe … d-storage/">http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ ](.
You're comparing apples and horses.
Yes, if you find a company whose business is backups and storage space, you will find cheaper prices on backups and storage space.
But for Linode to set up servers like that, that take up space in the datacenters, plus designing the infrastructure to hook them into the network, plus setting up the software to let you buy and manage space, plus maintaining the storage servers, plus extra servers for redundancy, plus the bandwidth costs of having a few people load 500gb of files each and hooking them to a public web server, etc, and you quickly see how their situation is vastly different than the link above.
The end result is that it is financially and practically infeasible for Linode to setup and maintain a separate connected infrastructure for expanded storage, and this fact will not change as a result of people asking or demanding for more storage.
Don't care about bandwidth consumption, and don't really need it to be super fast…
@obs:
What kind of problems do you have with s3, seems pretty simple to me I use s3fs with fuse and just use the linux cp commands to copy my files over.
It's more that I want to be able to make quite a large number of transactions and ideally it should be pretty responsive. S3 ends up with high charges when used as a FS with active data on it, and it's kinda flaky on the responsiveness front.
@obs:
What kind of problems do you have with s3, seems pretty simple to me I use s3fs with fuse and just use the linux cp commands to copy my files over.
S3 has three fundamental problems:
1) It's expensive. Using it for anything but long-term archiving is REALLY expensive. You have to pay four times for any data; first for the space to store it, second for the requests to get/put it, third for the S3 bandwidth to access it, and fourth for the linode bandwidth to access it. Using it for anything but archival storage is probably cost-prohibitive.
2) It' slow. All the benchmarks I've seen show it as being too slow to use as active storage. Again, probably not useful for much beyond archival purposes.
3) It's not ACID, meaning it can't be used for reliable storage when mounted. This means that if you write a block/file and read it again, you're not guaranteed to get back the same thing as you just wrote.
Number 3 is the killer; S3 is designed as a distributed system to handle large load, not be read like a consistent filesystem. And since S3 isn't consistent (when you write data, it takes time to propagate among nodes, and there's no guarantee that your read will hit a node that has the same data), it's very risk to use as a filesystem. Again, probably not bad for archival purposes where you write a lot but almost never read, but not good for an active filesystem.
Then again, no network file system is going to be as snappy as a local one :/ 7 months till linode turns 8 maybe bigger disks will come then
@obs:
7 months till linode turns 8 maybe bigger disks will come then :D
Disks, schmisks and memory, schmemory - what I need is a few dozen more CPUs.
"Massively multicore, massively multicore, wherefore art thou, massively multicore?"
James
Of course, since Linode is (or was) using quad-core dual xeon servers, they could double the core count in their future dual-processor systems.
@Guspaz:
Why?
By its very nature, my web site is sometimes CPU-bound with only four cores available:
The site does not tend to become memory-bound or IO-bound. I could actually make good use of many, many more CPU cores now that I make heavy use of parallelization for the mathematical calculations the site performs.
James
I would like to see a SAN solution for linode though
I guess you run some sort of app that exposes the storage for external use?
@zunzun:
By its very nature, my web site is sometimes CPU-bound with only four cores available:
http://zunzun.com
This is hilarious - these researchers used my web site in their paper on 1000+ massively multicore chips. Listed as reference 42 at the end of the paper.
@Guspaz:
Your site seems like it would trivially scale horizontally; unless your memory requirements are high, multiple linode 512s would seem to fit the bill.
Let's split this 50/50: you pay for them and I'll use them.
James
@zunzun:
@Guspaz:Your site seems like it would trivially scale horizontally; unless your memory requirements are high, multiple linode 512s would seem to fit the bill.
Let's split this 50/50: you pay for them and I'll use them.
That's a very rare usage for VPSes. I'm skeptical there's enough people with similar needs to make your usage work targetting. Frankly, if you get multiple linode 512s and you can peg all their CPUs, you're getting an amazing deal because nobody else is doing that. They're worried about shared disk bottlenecks while you have the CPUs to nearly yourself, at a far lower cost than would be required for your own quad-core server.
For the rest of us, we'll be thrilled when BTRFS is stable, because we'll be able to use the compression features to trade plentiful CPU for scarce disk and disk I/O.
I run about five medium-sized websites from my main linode, and on my most popular one I provide music mixes which range from 90-200mb uncompressed. I average about 25,000 pageviews a month and hover around 300-500GB transfer a month. Storage is a MAJOR problem for me as I don't wish to delete any of my old files. These are very rare files (it's a niche genre) and I'd like to maintain an archive indefinitely, which requires more and more storage.
I understand that there are a variety of storage solutions, even compressing/archiving music files would quadruple my storage capacity but I like the end-user to experience instant gratification. I also understand I could just get basic webhosting packages or a service like Amazon AWS but I'd rather send my money to Linode. I've been with Linode for years and the uptime, speeds, and support I've received doesn't make me want to go somewhere else.
I can't be the only case either, the following situations would require storage outside of current capabilities of Linode without the resources that a dedicated server would offer (at quadruple the price)
- Any type of File hosting/Repositories that continuously grow
–- Media streaming or serving
--- Custom software projects
--- Image uploading/serving
--- Personal backups (storing PC files on your Linode)
- Rapidly growing databases.
--- Highly active forums such as vBulletin quickly eat up space.
--- Archived statistics (detailed traffic history for your site)
--- Large-medium sized businesses with new customers
I'm not suggesting to change the base storage options for the VPS lineup, as it's fair for what most people do. I am suggesting that the storage upgrade options be increased dramatically while still managing a fair price. Surely some sort of cloud storage option is available at this point in time (its 2010!) which could allocate more than a few additional gigabytes storage to a customer.
Maybe I'm crazy but I'd like to see decently priced 100GB+ upgrade options.
Seems OK for storage
@Guspaz:
What do they charge for storage? Their published prices from 2008 are higher than Amazon's for storage (but cheaper for transfer), but they don't seem to publish any current pricing anywhere.
I guess you run some sort of app that exposes the storage for external use?