redundancy, considering at least two drives, doubles the price of the drive.

the servers use (several of us suspect) 15000 RPM server-grade drives.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 5000%20RPM

Starting here, we're looking at (on a glance at the first page) mostly 400GB drives for $450-$500. that includes cheapie, unknown quality drives.
adding onto that, you need double or more for a decent raid configuration.

these are not el-cheapo consumer grade desktop drives. these are workhorses, and you cannot expect them to cost anything like $150. be realistic.

and before you ask, "why don't they just set up cheap storage partitions that we can use?" - it is because they would be responsible if/when said cheap storage shat itself. it's their reputation on the line, and skimping on parts will lead to complaints, service interruptions, and customers pissed off because of downtime.

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うるさいうるさいうるさい！

As far as the storage argument that has been going on throughout this thread, I'd gladly pay $2-3/GB/year (which I believe is doable) for a volume I could mount on multiple linodes, for use for archiving certain types of information.

Beyond that, there's nothing that Linode is missing as far as meeting my needs.

1) FreeBSD
2) More storage
3) A data center somewhere in the Midwestern US, like Chicago.
4) Maybe a new type of server for hosting games. Something that would be "good enough" to run Minecraft, but would not be recommended for hosting your website. If that makes sense.

OK.

Linode hardware has room for 4 HDDs, and since they're in RAID10, the theoretical maximum total usable capacity per system is 1.2 TB per system (15K RPM drives top out at 600GB), and some of that would be required for the host.

So, the requirements to provide what you ask for is in fact, two dual-processor Xeon 1U servers with at least 24GB of RAM and 8x600GB 15K RPM SAS drives. It looks like the only 1U unit supporting sandy bridge is the R620 (the R420G2 can't do the HDDs, the R520 isn't sold). The closest I can get with that server is coming out to roughly $13,000. We need two of them to meet your requirements of 2TB of space, so that's $26,000. Plus the directly storage-related costs such as replacement parts, the staff cost of maintaining them, the extra power for that storage, etc.

Suddenly $24,000 doesn't seem so bad for what you're getting.

What many of us advocate is a different approach: a many-disk SAN that uses a ton of big RAID-grade 7200RPM SATA or SAS drives to hit a substantially lower price-point. Don't get me wrong, such an enterprise-grade SAN is very expensive, and the speeds wouldn't be nearly as good, but it's MUCH cheaper per-gig.

If we look at Dell's entry-level iSCSI SAN solution, which uses 12x SAS disks, and we put in 12x 1TB 7200RPM SAS drives (the largest configuration), we get roughly the same cost per server (~$13,000), but 6TB of usable space instead of 1.2TB of usable space. If we assumed per-gig storage costs were directly proportional to hardware costs (they're not, but let's just pretend), that would result in a cost reduction from $2/GB/mth to $0.40/GB/mth. Not a bad start. The 3600i series doubles the number of disk for less than a doubling in cost, which would get us to $0.26/GB/mth. Using a more DIY approach than Dell storage arrays, or using 2TB SATA enterprise drives instead of 1TB SAS enterprise drives could further reduce that cost. I don't think an end-user price of $0.20/mth/GB is out of the question with this method, and a 90% reduction in extra storage pricing would certainly satisfy a lot of people even if this option had a substantially reduced performance. Sometimes you just want some place to put seldom-accessed bulk data...

Yaz,

Thanks.
I have been able to figure it out in the end, with assistance from HowToForge. My solution is different to your suggested code, but I've tested mine and it works. I posted the final step in the thread started here by SuperFastCars.

Other than the mod_rewrite code in the /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadminconf file, which is covered here in the forum, the key to making it work was issuing the command "a2ensite default-ssl" which turned on Apache2's SSL functionality, not mentioned in the guide.
I'm still puzzled how ISPConfig worked and continues to work without this command.

Chesty,
Concerning Forums, absolutely yes.
Concerning IRC, they've never specifically mentioned it. Had they done so, I wouldn't have persued that path anyway as I've never used it and have no intentions of doing so at this point in time. (I've seen it as a security risk for the last 15+ years. TBH, I don't know why IRC has that reputation, but that's where I'm at).
As far as Linode staff are concerned, I absolutely agree with you!!! Hence I capitalised and used bold when I wrote SOME Linode staff. Those individuals have really made the difference for me.
The staff I was complaining about are ones who drop in midway though a ticket (of which I've raised 4 resolved ones, and 1 unresolved (which relates to the Yaz's suggestion) and post:

Hello,

Although we try to answer all questions as best we can, Linode provides an unmanaged service and software-specific questions like this are beyond the scope of our support.

I'd suggest joining our active user community and asking there. You can find out more about the user community here:

http://www.linode.com/community/

Let us know if you have any future service-related questions that we can assist with.

Regards,

and offer nothing else.

Personally I rather be ignored, told "Sorry, I don't know.", or "It's going to take 3 hours for me to solve that one for you, and cost $YYY".

The other thing I should point out is that all of my questions relate to Guides provided here. So I saw and still see my tickets as quality improvements rather than a form of 'Managed VPS". Yes I've had some assistance midway through a ticket on some syntax and basic Linux command matters, but hey, I live in a Microsoft world when I'm not here.

pclissold & Guspaz,

Customers always have higher expectations than service providers. That's the nature of the business. And, as I indicated in my post, I'm happy to agree to disagree on what our respective expectations are.


Cheers,
Nap

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My VPS system:
(Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Kernel 3.15.4-x86_64, Apache 2.4.7, MariaDB Server 5.5.40, MariaDB Client 5.5.41, PHP 5.5.9, ISPConfig 3.0.5.4p5, Webmin, PureFTP & Quota, phpMyAdmin, postfix, dovecot, amavis, clamav, spamassassin, awstats, fail2ban, Jailkit, bind9, vlogger, webalizer)

I meant more, it's not reasonable to read the terms of service that says "we will not do X" and then have the expectation that they will do X...

That said, Linode has certainly heard the demand for a level of support that is broader in scope, and they're currently beta-testing a fully managed service.

1. (Free)BSD. I love how so many others are also posting this

2. Don't sell out!

3. Keep up the interaction with your customers!

Since this thread is old now, what - if anything - did caker take away from it? Please report back in this thread!!

My 1,2,3 list would be in line with what many has already stated.

1) low grade and CHEAP extra disk space.
2) do not sell out. you are probably already rich as bonkers so why not keep on living the dream and keep rocking it as the best VPS provider out there. look what happened to slicehost.
3) low grade and CHEAP extra disk space. That's how important it is to me. Right now I have to use a completely fine 768 instance just to have a backup that I control myself. It soon turns into a 1024 and it sucks having to pay for that when all I need is a 256 (which isn't an option nowadays but still with the extra disk space.

Thanks.

My 1)

My 2)

My 3)

Zero3 is obviously a wise and discerning person!

Well, I'm going to be the dissenter; I would be more than happy if Linode wanted to sell their business, to me.

Higher priority first:

1- Extra cheaper, less safe, STORAGE;

2- Domain registering;

3- Cheaper bandwidth.

This is all I need for implementing my own cloud storage, a place where I can have 24/7 access to my RAW-formatted pictures, videos and documents and also apps made by myself.

24/7 access and "less safe" don't really go hand-in-hand.

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I'll go with FreeBSD, some sort of extra storage solution(even if it is slower), and perhaps some sort of donation to a charity for cats for each customer.