Hey all. I had a Linode from 2003 until 2006. This was early in Linode.com's life and there were teething problems (related to I/O starving of linodes under the UML system) that were mostly worked out, and I'm sure that with Xen, things are even better than ever.

I check back periodically to see if I can return to linode.com. I *loved* Linode and would choose it over any other service in a heartbeat if I could. But, there is an ongoing shortcoming of linode.com that hasn't been addressed in the three years that I've been away, although I keep waiting ... and waiting.

Basically, I need more disk space. The 360 MB of RAM is more than enough for me - my current host only uses 128 MB of active RAM, and the 256 total that I have there is already more than enough. But 12 GB of disk space is just ridiculously limiting. Even 36 GB of a Linode 1080 is limiting.

To put a finer point on it: I've been with ServerPronto since leaving Linode in 2006. At ServerPronto I've had 256 MB of RAM and 40 GB of disk space in a dedicated machine; the same machine the entire three years in fact, as they've never upgraded anything. Despite never having upgraded their accounts in 3 years, they still offer MUCH more disk space than Linode. Comparing plans:

ServerPronto.com from THREE YEARS AGO: 256 MB RAM, 40 GB disk, Sempron 1800 dedicated
Linode.com TODAY: 540 MB RAM, 18 GB disk, Quad Xeon who-knows-what-but-I'm-sure-it's-really-really-fast split 30 ways

I'm comparing mostly apples-to-apples here as the serverpronto account is $30/month and so is a Linode 540.

Now, it's great that Linode offers almost twice the RAM as serverpronto. But that doesn't help me as I'm only using about 128 MB as it is. All I run is a web server, mail server, and some other basic services. It's just a vanity server after all.

But I do run gallery for our family photos and that's at 8 GB right now. The operating system and miscellaneous stuff is at about 4 GB. So a Linode 360 would have enough RAM, but would already have a full disk. A Linode 540 would give me less than 6 GB breathing room. And this is after I've pared down my disk usage to the minimum I could; I store backups of my home system there and that wouldn't fit on a Linode 540.

So consider this an official bitch by an ex-customer who has kept silent about this issue for years now hoping it would resolve itself. DISK SPACE IS CHEAP. Linode.com needs to offer 3x the disk space on each plan, period. The arguments saying that "managed disk space is much more expensive" do not hold water here. Just offering 3x the disk space will take linode to where it should have been 3 years ago.

I get the feeling that Linode is only offering as much disk space as they need to be competitive with other similar services. For some reason all of the virtual hosting sites offer pitiful disk quantities. I'm guessing that it's because they have so many hosts on a machine; it's not hard to fit 80 GB onto a single computer (that was easy 5 years ago). But I suppse it's a bit harder to fit 40x36x2=almost 3 TB of disk onto a Linode 360 host. But even that isn't *that* hard, is it? Four 750 GB drives cost what these days? $500? Can Linode afford $500 per host to upgrade disk space to something reasonable?

So allow me to summarize my rant:

I want a Linode 540 that has *at least* 36 GB of disk space. I've been waiting for years for Linode to supply reasonable disk space with their plans (in fact I wasn't happy with the disk space provided from day 1 with Linode.com, so it's been 5.5 years now that I've felt that Linode has been behind the curve here). I don't mind if Linode freezes the RAM amount for 3 years, if that's what it takes to focus on disk space improvements.

I really want to come back to Linode.com! But I need more disk space PLEASE!

Sempron 1800
We've got dual Xeon 5420's here. Usually burstable all the way up.

Anyway, I believe Linode is already working on something similar, in the form of remote storage and/or backup. From what I've heard, the new service will probably launch this year. Check back from time to time.

Others here will tell you to just offload your stuff to Amazon S3 or something like that. I'm not particularly fond of S3 (no standard POSIX-compliant way to access my files!) so I got a cheap server with lots of disk space elsewhere, mounted remotely on my Linode. As long as the other server is geographically close enough to the Linode, access speeds are quite good. Of course this method doubles my bandwidth usage, because the files need to be transferred in from the other server every time it is transferred out to a user. But I've got plenty of bandwidth left anyway...


AFAIK, there are no "other similar services" (other than Slicehost which recently got sold). Linode isn't one of those thousands of cheap OpenVZ/HyperVM VPS providers who can oversell as much as they like.

personally I will choose 100MB mem over 100GB HD

OK, I'll keep checking back, as I have been doing for 3 years now ...



I alread offloaded my photo storage (which is all of my photos and movies from my digital camera(s), not just the stuff I host on my gallery site) to S3; that freed about 19 GB up on my server.

I also went so far as to start writing a POSIX compliant filesystem layer for S3 using Linux FUSE, but I quit after getting to the caching layer that would need to be very sophisticated to provide good performance with S3's impoverished access methods. I did end up with a nice C library for S3, which is at:

http://libs3.ischo.com/index.html

And I still consider finishing the project and completing a POSIX FUSE filesystem for S3 ...

But - I really shouldn't have to spend hundreds of hours implementing a filesystem for storing my files remotely on S3, just to have reasonable disk space on Linode.com. Surely there is an easier way: Linode can add more disks to its servers!



There were others, at least a couple of years ago. This page lists quite a few:

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Virtu ... rProviders

I *know* that Linode is high quality and doesn't oversell. That's why I like them. I was with Linode.com from 2003 to 2006 remember, and I was very sad to go. But 12 GB for $20/month is just ... sad.

Different users have different needs. I value more disk over more RAM, and I wish that Linode would offer packages that meet my needs.

I would oh-so-gladly take 100 GB HD over 100 MB of RAM.

So reduce a Linode 360 to 260 MB of memory and add 100 GB of HD and I'll take it. In a heartbeat.

Linode's servers are 1U servers, which are physically limited to having four hard drives. After mirroring, this leaves you with two disks worth of usable space.

12GB per Linode 360 multiplied by 40 Linode 360s per host is 480GB; split across two drive-pairs, that's 240GB per hard drive, plus some room for OS and extras. Certainly beatable with newer hard drives, but Linode's hosts are of varying age, and they tend not to do upgrades unless everyone can benefit.

(Also note that these aren't $20 Sears 1TB off-brand squeaky-bearing drives, either, so the cost is higher and the capacity lower than consumer-grade equipment.)

So, I figure incredible leaps in disk allocations are unlikely, unless massive hardware replacement occurs, storage density skyrockets appreciably, or a new architecture for storage is introduced.

I think what you need is a self-hosted gallery program that can just point the photo storage + serving to Amazon S3, and then use the local disk for database/meta-data keeping. Someone has done it

http://stephenskory.com/s3-with-gallery2

although it is a bit fiddly (I would rather have a gallery app having that function built in using S3's API rather than S3fs).

Edit: Another advantage --> you can move servers/installations/etc without creating a huge tarball, if the actual photos are stored elsewhere.

There are these things called "SANs". Or, if you wanna be extra
cheap, there are also "NASes"

Disk space *is* dirt cheap, even at the enterprise level, compared to any other resource, and it does seem odd that disk resources at Linode are so tight. There have been mentions from the Linode actuals here and there about disk space upgrades coming, and I assume, like everything else they do, they are making sure to whole-ass it, and we'll all be better for the time they took making sure everything works. I'm waiting for more disk, too, but I'm not about to give up my Linode in the interim

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/03/03/media-temple-issues-credits-for-38-hour-outage/

Just sayin'. There are advantages to keeping hosts self-contained.

Haven't looked at your library in any detail yet, but just to make sure, you're not trying to reinvent the wheel, are you?
http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon

Disk space is the one spec on a Linode that stands out as lacking. Maybe the (at least temporary) answer is to change the pricing for extra disk space. $2/GB/month is awfully high. Maybe have it start out at $.25/GB/month for the first, oh, 20GB, and then have it get more expensive from there? Those numbers are made up, but you get the idea.

That would discourage the people who don't really need the space from using it. It would discourage people from using up all the space on the host. And most importantly, it would leave an affordable option for people who need a couple dozen more gigs.

+1 and also allow us to add more than 6GB of extra disk space...

On the other hand, I've been on several different hosts lately and all of them had ~200GB of leftover disk space according to the "Extras" page. Could it be a sign that Linode is currently adding more space to each node in preparation for an upgrade?

Ooh, that would be nice.

I'm on two different Linode 540 hosts at the moment, in two different datacenters, and both report 137040 MB free. Is that the limit that will be displayed, or is that a big coincidence?

The host I'm on has more free space than that. Maybe your coincidence is due to the fact that both hosts are full?

(18 x 1024M x 30) + 137040M = 690000M

It's a nicely rounded number which we don't often see in computers, so the limit is likely to be by design. And it's just a few gigs shy of the usual capacity of a 750GB hard drive

That must be it. Good thinking.