And some day they'll have to move to SSDs just to keep up, because as CPU and RAM resources increase by Moore's law, IOPS will increasingly become the bottleneck. They won't be able to fit more linodes onto a host regardless of CPU or RAM availability because the IO won't be there to support them. And that certainly won't help capacity whenever that happens.

Cheap and slow supplemental network storage may be the only real answer within the next few years. And I don't think it requires quite as much rack space as hoopycat implies, when you can fit 36TB in 2U, 144TB in 4U, and with multiple vendors having just announced 1TB per platter, and 5 platters being possible in 3.5" drives, that's going to go up a bunch.

There are many other concerns, certainly. Manpower, performance, reliability, cost, etc. I don't think rack space is a primary concern, though.

Straw man. I never said that Linode had to upgrade their disks every couple of months, nor did I say that they had to upgrade all of their disks at the same time.

As I have harped on many times in the past, Linode's disk offerings were small to begin with (yes I bought a Linode when the offering was 1 GB per Linode disk space) and even then haven't kept pace, in my opinion, with the cost of drives.

That being said, I think there are business reasons why Linode doesn't offer more disk space; those being that the majority of the customers come to Linode because of the high CPU allotments, good control panel, and support. Disk space only factors in for a minority such as myself.

That doesn't meant that I can't still want it, can't still believe that if Linode wanted to prioritize disk space that it couldn't do so, and can't still make my opinions known in the hope that Linode takes action.



That is not a very compelling upgrade path. I know, because I recently had to do it; I'm paying an extra $10 per month to get a bunch of extra CPU and RAM that I don't need, just so that I can get 8 GB more disk. $120 per year for 8 GB of disk seems too expensive to me.

Right now I'm a customer who desperately wants to find an alternative to Linode for my hosting needs. I would rather be a customer who is happy to stay with Linode. Linode may not care whether or not some customers are desperate to leave or happy to stay, but I think they should be.

Disk space has become dirt cheap in the last few years but disk performance is still very expensive. Shared hosting isn't going to work with anything but the fastest disks and everything needs to be RAID-1 at a minimum. I'd love more disk space too but if Linode went with EMC or HP SAN's they would be able to give us maybe twice the disk space for 5 times the cost.

If you need lots of disk space a bottom end dedicated server with a real disk might be better for you. I don't know if having one in Germany is any good for you but I've used netdirekt.de in the past and they are good value for money. Linode wins at everything except disk capacity.

I could not agree with you more. Some people may think I am greedy, but I want Linode to win at everything!

I've seen threads going back to 2009 where people are begging for internal network storage of any kind (fast or slow). I don't understand the hold up. I have a website that I've run for years as a hobby, I'm out of drive space so my only option is shut down or rewrite code.

I am otherwise so impressed with Linode, that I'd rather start a new website than switch hosts.

I always thought that they kept it small to be able to quickly transfer linodes between data centers. If they offered everyone 300GB disks, datacenter -> datacenter or 512->768 would not be reasonable.

Which is why SANs would be nice, since migrating around inside the datacenter (linode moves, resizes, etc) wouldn't need to actually move, since it's external storage.

One potential option for extracting more space out of your linode: filesystem-level compression. Depending on the type of content you're storing, it could be useful, and Linodes tend to have an abundance of processing power.

Nearly all, VPS players have had or do have problems/fluctuations with their SANS setup including Rackspace, UK2, Softlayer, Amazon quassi-San style storage, etc... Linode doesnt extreme HD issues with regards to performance, lets leave it that way

It's easy to not have storage issues when you don't have any storage. :-\

This is part of the reason I have requested SAN as an addon. Let the OS run off the local drives that have higher performance and let me mount an additional SAN drive for more storage. That would also help the SAN storage since you wouldn't have every Linode reading every file off the SAN.