Linode and low storage space
Recently I decided that I want to stop running my own hardware and possibly move to hosted solution, so I started looking for alternatives. I host some websites on my own server and that's the main need for the server anyways, but I do have some needs for running cronjobs and some additional processes, etc.
I've heard a lot of good about Linode's servers, so I decided to take a closer look. The server specifications seem mostly quite suitable for me, except for the storage space. I was really surprised how low the offered storage was. Then I read that people actually host multiple instances on same hosting plan, even with the smallest plans and I'm struggling to fathom how people get by with that.
I'm kinda used to the philosophy that reserving less than 15GB of HDD for the operating system itself, is plain shortsightedness. Then what ever you're hosting in that installation is going to take some more. So in no way is the lowest plan (16GB) sufficient for a proper server instance (in my opinion). Now, I'm not planning to run a fileserver or anything of the sorts, but if I'm going to have hosting for other users, it's a real bummer to have to limit the storage space to something so low.
So please, tell me, what am I missing here? It's 2011 and HDD's doesn't cost much, so why is Linode still offering storage plans that correlates to the needs from early 2000's?
In every other way Linode seems perfect, but I was expecting the lowest plan to have at least 50GB of storage, and even that would have been "low". I don't want to pay for the Linode 4096 plan just because I need more storage.
Oh yea and I noticed that in the Sign up page there is a mention: "Additional IP addresses, RAM, Storage, and Transfer can be added later", and I have crawled through the Linode site, but I can't find ANY information about the costs of extra storage. Do I have to sign up before I can see that or something?
16 Replies
Remember, while the hard drives you buy on newegg for you box at home are pretty cheap, the high end drives that Linode puts in their host machines are less cheap…
That isn't really the limiting factor though. The biggest issue is how many drives you can put in a server. I assume Linode uses 1U servers (density is very important in the VPS business), which means they have a maximum of 4 drive bays. Linode runs RAID10, which means half the disk space is available.
Now consider that you have an average of 40 Linode 512's on a host. 40*16 = 640GB. Leave some space for the host, and the extras you mentioned, and we're quickly approaching 750GB.
The other thing to consider is that in order to upgrade the disk space on the plans, they have to upgrade all the plans. When you have thousands of legacy servers, that's not a small feat….
Anyway I've managed servers with hundreds/thousands of gigs before and they tend to use slower drives (7200rpm…or even 5400). Linode uses 10k or maybe even 15k drives which if you do a quick google you'll see are expensive and not high capacity. You sacrifice capacity for speed. In a VPS environment where disk IO is the most likely place of contention you need the speed.
As for 15gb for an operating system…we're not running windows here's one of my nodes on ubuntu 10.04
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda 15G 3.1G 11G 22% /
/dev 241M 116K 241M 1% /dev
/dev/shm 264M 0 264M 0% /dev/shm
none 264M 92K 264M 1% /var/run
none 264M 0 264M 0% /var/lock
none 264M 0 264M 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/xvdc 985M 17M 959M 2% /tmp
@obs:
And we just got +25% disk space!
For a minute, I thought I missed an announcement made some days ago. But no.
Thanks much Linode!
@demonicus:
I'm kinda used to the philosophy that reserving less than 15GB of HDD for the operating system itself, is plain shortsightedness.
In the dedicated server business, everyone is used to having lots and lots of disk space. There are already 3TB drives out there, and we'll probably see 5TB by this time next year. Meanwhile, disk speed hasn't increased much (except SSD, which usually don't come in such large sizes) so it takes a long time to move around a lot of data. This leads to the "philosophy" of reserving large amounts of disk space to every partition, because repartitioning can be very painful.
In VPS environments, on the other hand, you pay for what you use. So there's a strong incentive for you to purchase only the resources that you need NOW. It is not "shortsightedness" to use a small OS partition now, because if you ever need more space, you can upgrade at any time.
A bare LAMP stack only takes up around 1GB. To save money, you should watch your disk usage like a hawk and take appropriate actions to keep it under control. For example, if you plan on producing verbose log files and keeping them for a long time, you should set up a cron job to zip them up and move them to a storage-oriented service such as Amazon S3. The same applies to any large static files such as videos.
Also, as @JshWright said, the disk drives you get at Linode aren't the 7200 rpm SATA variety that are getting cheaper every week. In order to deliver acceptable performance to 40 customers at the same time, the disks need to be very very fast – something like 15K rpm SAS drives. Those babies cost a fortune.
@demonicus:
if I'm going to have hosting for other users, it's a real bummer to have to limit the storage space to something so low.
The "unlimited everything for $7.99/mo" business model that shared hosts often use is obviously not suitable here. You need a farm of dedicated servers for that. But remember that there are "premium" shared hosts who still manage to sell 5GB of disk space for $20/mo, and who won't suspend you the next time you get slashdotted. That's something you can easily do with a cluster of Linodes.
@demonicus:
I can't find ANY information about the costs of extra storage. Do I have to sign up before I can see that or something?
You just upgrade to the next plan. There's also extra storage that you can purchase temporarily, but it's extremely expensive ($2/mo) and not advertised anywhere, which probably means that Linode wants you to just upgrade.
I'm hosting webspace for a couple of my friends who are artists (one of them is a musician and one makes music videos, etc) and they produce quite a lot of material that they want to host on their sites. Now that everything is high quality and lossless, etc, the file sizes keep growing all the time. The musician currently has 5GB of own music hosted on his webpage (this includes some raw materials he likes to keep in safe, etc) and the one who makes videos, is sporting 20GB usage on his website.
Obviously I can't offer that kind of service for them anymore with Linode, which is a bit of a bummer, but I guess it's time for them to start paying for the services they're leeching off of me.
I decided to give it a go. The smallest plan wasn't too expensive, so I can experiment with it.
Hopefully I can get this thing working with the limited space.
Thanks again everyone, I'll be shouting more here when I run into problems with managing the storage space.
@obs:
You could consider off loading your large files to a CDN (content delivery network) it's what they're designed for, and just have the sites on the node.
That is exactly what I was going to recommend and is what I believe many here do. Place your standard website files on your Linode and any large files can be distributed directly from Amazon S3. That removes the files from the Linode, saves disk space on the Linode for other files, and still provides fast access to those larger files.
@demonicus:
I'm kinda used to the philosophy that reserving less than 15GB of HDD for the operating system itself, is plain shortsightedness.
Other people have told you why disk space is in short supply.
I'm gonna address this part in 2 ways:
1: My root disk for a CentOS 5 machine:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda 1.9G 751M 1.2G 39% /
You really really don't need 15Gb for your OS install. Heck, even my Ubuntu workstation at home uses less than 5Gb, and that's with a lot of useless desktop crap that doesn't need to be on a server.
2: Disk resizing is actually quite easy. From the linode control panel you can resize volumes and add more space; you don't even need to do a re-install; the disk just expands. (Of course you need free allocation - eg the 25% just given to us! - to do this; but you can always resize your linodes quickly). This means the consequence of under-sizing your root disk isn't too painful.
I use youtube - private urls for video hosting, picasa for photos, etc. That keeps it off my linode space.
Of course not ideal for all, but works if you just need photos and videos online.
@demonicus:
I'm kinda used to the philosophy that reserving less than 15GB of HDD for the operating system itself, is plain shortsightedness. Then what ever you're hosting in that installation is going to take some more. So in no way is the lowest plan (16GB) sufficient for a proper server instance (in my opinion).
That may be true for a Windows installation. That may even be true for a Desktop Linux installation that requires way more files and programs than a server installation.
For the past several years that I'm using a VPS, I never, ever had OS require more than 2GB. Of course, all this depends on what programs you would need to run, but for the majority of server setups this is usually the case.
Of course, we wanted to have a file server for our design team, and Linodes don't have anywhere close to enough disk space to be useful for that.
Linode's current storage options are very fast and small (15K RPM and all). It'd be nice if there was an option for slow and big. SAN storage for example
i began a forum for posting images of street art three years ago. It moved from shared hosting to cheap VPS. cheap VPS to another, worse VPS. and finally Linode. The forum software itself runs fantastically on Linode. and I can't recommend them enough.
BUT.. the amount of hosted images & users on my forum has risen from a handful to near on 50,000 images and 4000 users.
I have moved up from a 512 to a 1024.
This is where I begin to sympathize with the O.P.
The VPS i have is perfect RAM and Performance wise for the job. But the sheer volume of hosted images is about to outgrow a 1024 Linode.
Upgrade to the next Linode? I can't afford to, nor see the point in doubling ALL system specs. And the 'extras' option for space etc is ludicrously priced.
And before you all say… a forum that hosts it's own images? why not use photobucket etc… Well.. this forum is designed to be a long-standing 'archive' that doesn't outsource it's hosting to imagehosts etc.
short of moving them all to Amazon.. I'm lost for ideas..
@hybinet:
A bare LAMP stack only takes up around 1GB.
What? A bare LAMP stack takes up much less than that. You can get LAMP + the OS in less than 500MB if you ditch all the crap that the OS includes by default. In fact you can go much lower than that but I've never felt the need to aggressively optimise my OS installs.
@revesone:
i'd like to chime in here with my particular situation.
i began a forum for posting images of street art three years ago. It moved from shared hosting to cheap VPS. cheap VPS to another, worse VPS. and finally Linode. The forum software itself runs fantastically on Linode. and I can't recommend them enough.
BUT.. the amount of hosted images & users on my forum has risen from a handful to near on 50,000 images and 4000 users.
I have moved up from a 512 to a 1024.
This is where I begin to sympathize with the O.P.
The VPS i have is perfect RAM and Performance wise for the job. But the sheer volume of hosted images is about to outgrow a 1024 Linode.
Upgrade to the next Linode? I can't afford to, nor see the point in doubling ALL system specs. And the 'extras' option for space etc is ludicrously priced.
And before you all say… a forum that hosts it's own images? why not use photobucket etc… Well.. this forum is designed to be a long-standing 'archive' that doesn't outsource it's hosting to imagehosts etc.
short of moving them all to Amazon.. I'm lost for ideas..
The reason Linode space is so expensive is because it's premium quality, fast hardware. I don't know what Amazon runs on as it's a CDN rather than storage per se, but in general you'd expect cheaper, slower hardware because it's all you'd need. At the moment, you're using the wrong tool for the job.
If your community revolves around these files I'd be inclined to copy them to Amazon anyway, for redundancy. Two back-ups, one-off site, and you're pretty safe indeed. It would cost virtually nothing too, since their pricing is focused on bandwidth. And since you've done that, may as well serve from there too, right? If your forum software is a major brand, you might be lucky enough to find code already floating around the internet to do what you want.