I know this has been brought up before, but I think it is a big enough issue that it should be brought up again. The issue is disk space. As we all know, the plans do not come with much disk space compared to what you can get with other hosts. I would like to see more disk space made available to those who want it.

I understand the limited amount of physical drive space that each machine has, but why not sell SAN space that could be mounted as an additional drive? I could use S3, but that isn't feasible for all cases. One case I can think of immediately is a potential customer who has several GBs of photos stored in a database. S3 wouldn't work very well with that. I personally have a project that would require way more space than is provided. If there was a separate mount that provided quick access to the files then these situations could easily be accommodated.

Again, I understand the issues, but the disk limitation should be corrected.

You can add additional disk space for all Linodes, and a 2880 has 96gb of space... Exactly how much do you intend on serving out, and to who that's going to be willing to wait for that much data to download?

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for and I'm more than happy with the disk space available vs the price at Linode... If you're requiring that much space, you should probably be looking into paying for a dedicated server IMHO.

Disk space is definitely Linode's weakest point right now.

"Who's going to be willing to wait for that much data to download?"

That's a strange question, considering we're sitting on some pretty fat pipe here at Linode. If you're getting the 2880, you're right, you should definitely at least consider a dedicated server. But there are a lot of services that would work fine on a 360 or a 540, if there were some more space.

Off the top of my head:

Email server for a medium-sized company or extended family.

Running a photo gallery service where people can upload the raw files from their camera for offsite backup and so others can download or view scaled-down versions.

Hosting a large number of static Web sites.


There are probably dozens more. The point is, people who are looking to run those kinds of services are getting some tempting offers from elsewhere, and Linode can fix that by adding some more space, or at least setting a reasonable price on additional space.

I'd expect a medium-sized business to be able to either run their own or be able to pay for a dedicated server.


Nothing like reinventing the wheel's of Flickr, Google's PicasaWeb etc. This would be the closest to possibly requiring that much space, but I don't think it's that common.


Again, most like a business activity which could be charged for, and in turn pay for a dedicated machine. And if we look at 100gb os disk space, take out 2gb for the O/S and assume 20mb per site, that's still just under 5000 websites

I'm not trying to be rude or argumentative or anything -- I'm just genuinely curious what the OP needs so much disk space for on what is effectively a shared-host, and without the desire to upgrade to a dedicated host.

Look, we don't want to deal with a dedicated machine, we're trying to do neat stuff on our Linode, which is what this whole thing is all about. We're bumping up against disk space.

Why should we have to deal with a dedicated server when it's not necessary? You seem to have a pretty narrow vision of what can be done on a Linode, and if the disk space situation stays the same, maybe you're right, but others see more potential.

And the main point is that there are getting to be other providers which alleviate this "bottleneck". We'd much rather stay here. But according to you, what we should be doing is coming to our senses and spending a bunch of money on dedicated hardware. Pass.

Yeah, I agree that disk space is the only restrictive aspect in the plans. There was talk about a SAN option, and I asked about it a few months ago in the irc channel. The response was that it was still planned and being worked on. There wasn't an ETA, but it sounded like it was coming.

Geez, get defensive

Stueth, I was only trying to conduct a civil and constructive converstation to find out and maybe learn something new.

And to think how nice everyone else at Linode has been.

Dropping this now.

The reason I have brought this up is because I have services that run just fine on a 360. I just need more disk space. And why should I have to rely on some 3rd party service when I can easily create my own with everything the way I want it to be? All I need is disk space. If I'm willing to pay for it then I should be allowed to reinvent as desired.

And what makes you think I want a dedicated server? A quick search on findmyhosting.com gives the lowest price of $88 for 80GB storage, 100GB transfer, and a static IP address. That does not compare to what I can get with Linode. It isn't cost effective for me to have a dedicated server.

Don't think that I can't run my own server to do all of this. I can and I do for my primary job, but I am trying to run a small business. In my case (not my customers) I want to run a database server that will have a large amount of data. I don't need the processing power, but I do need the storage and I cannot use S3. If I did I would use all of my transfer syncing the database files with S3.

I have legitimate reasons for needing more storage. I also have legitimate reasons for not wanting a dedicated server.

I'm resisting my impulse to start another thread and I hope this one gets read...I'd really like more disk space. Before the "go somewhere else for that" rant starts, let me say that I've looked, and I can't find anyone that offers a Xen VPS with a SAN option. If you know of one, feel free to PM me.

My requirement is just cheap disk space - cheaper than $0.15/GB, since I can get that from JungleDisk (using CloudFiles instead of S3 you don't even pay for bandwidth). Considering, however, that a project I just started working on will end up with >300GB of data (== $45/mo) I'd really like a cheaper option.

This should be an excellent business opportunity for Linode. I don't need my data backed up a dozen times around the world. Simple RAID5/6 in the Linode DCs should be fine. It doesn't have to be perfect, I just need BIG and CHEAP. This will improve customer stickiness - once I have a ton of data on your servers, I won't want to move to another VPS provider. Currently, with my data "in the cloud" it is trivial to move to another provider if a great VPS deal comes along.

Don't preach to me about quality - I've done my research and I'm here for just that reason. Nevertheless, customer stickiness is something every business needs.

Thanks!

P.S. What I'm hoping to solicit would be an ETA and/or expected price point, so I know if Linode will have an offering that meets my needs anytime soon. Thanks again! =)

This was my biggest concern as well. I moved to linode from a physical server that had raid1 76GB drives. I now have 24GB of space for the same price as I paid for my old colo. My home directory for MY user was 20gb on the old server. I had to remove a lot of data to make it fit onto the new server and so far it's been successful. On the flip side I've had to setup quotas for all my users and start monitoring their uploads. My biggest disk usage is my photo gallery. I don't want to move it to an online service because I want 100% control over it so that I know damn well what is and isn't being viewed. I value my privacy.

I know you can add more disk but the size/rates are retarded and not very desirable. I would love to see disk space increase but so far I am making it work by extremely limiting my self and my users.

This seems like a really good idea, for everyone.

Cores are getting cheaper fast, and it's getting pretty easy to overwhelm the disks of a machine without the CPUs being under much load at all.

Linode sticks to a 40:1 host:VM ratio now in large part due to disk contention. In a few years a server with 32 hardware threads will be no big deal, and a huge number of VMs are going to be able to run on that... but the disks won't keep up. Once you can scale disks separately from hosts, that's not a problem anymore.

I don't even think it needs to be cheap. Price it like a colocated hard drive. It'll still be easier than dealing with buying/maintaining/colocating a server.

It's not a rush for me; any projects where I might have used this have come and gone for now. But, in general I think I would be happy to pay an amount that Linode would be happy to provide the service for.

You're not gonna get much cheaper than that. Let's assume you can get a cheap 1.5 Tbyte disk from NewEgg for $130; that's $0.087 per Gb. You, of course, need more than 1 disk for redundancy. Plus DC space/power/HVAC. Plus staff. And that's with a cheap consumer disk not rated for server operations (higher failure rate). And some profit, maybe?

15c/Gb is a pretty good price

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

Industrial-strength fibre SAN hardware will cost you about $1000 / Terabyte. Over two years that comes to around $0.04 / GiB / month. Data centre costs will likely double that. Add a markup and you are at around $0.10 / GiB / month.

If Linode does deploy 'storage linodes', the price per GiB may come down a bit compared to the price for disk space in the Linodes themselves, but the price is not going to drop through the floor like some people think/hope.

_________________
/ Peter

Since the marginal cost for additional disk space right now is $2/GB/month, I would definitely take anything approaching $.10/GB/month.

Ditto.