If I was busy filling rack space with 1U servers that can generate $800/mo, I'm not sure how eager I'd be to start selling NAS at a price point that gets me maybe $100/mo for the same slot.

well, if you want to keep your rack space filled with $800/mo servers you should be somewhat eager to also offer complimentary services (like NAS storage)

I would also like to see additional storage as an option. Anything that beats S3 would be fantastic. It doesn't even have to be high performance, just large and relatively cheap as others have put it. Something I could mount with NFS would be fine.

S3 is good, but it's another vendor I have to deal with and I can't use my favorite filesystem tools with it (rsync, find, etc), which limits its usefulness. I don't know what's most cost effective for you to implement, but I would think even the least performant solution should beat S3.

Maybe you could offer one option at a premium price for those wanting to host large database systems and other demanding applications and a low cost bulk storage option for the rest of us wanting to host large collections of files (or backups) that don't require super performance.

And as always, you guys rock. I'm a happy member of a linode64 (1GB Storage) that followed the upgrade path.

I have one customer who had such a requirement. I set him up with Cloudlayer VPS at Softlayer which runs on the Citrix Xen platform. They have many enterprise storage solutions. But for 99% of users who aren't trying to archive massive amounts of data (myself included) linode is great.

This is one of the things I use my linode for, essentially a large family photo album that has security set so that only family members get to the whole album. Right now I'm getting around the storage limit by shrinking the photos somewhat before uploading them, but I would love to be able to just upload the full resolution versions.

I don't need the extra CPU, memory or bandwidth that comes with the larger server, the only limit I am anywhere near is the storage limit.

Regards,

Stephen

well, then why not dump all the pix into a S3 account ?

or some cheapo shared hosting account.

Well for simplicity I'd prefer not to, but Amazon's pricing of $0.15/GB/month is a lot better than Linode's $1.25/GB/month, so at some point I may look at this. The only thing that's a big uncertain about the Amazon approach is the additional charges for the data transfers during the month, though with my limited set of users this would probably still be a lot cheaper than the Linode extra storage.

The most cost effective way of adding storage to a Linode is just to get a bigger VPS, so for $10 you get an additional 8GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth. Now if you were to buy 8GB of storage from Amazon it would cost $1.20 leaving you with $8.80 which you could put towards your Amazon transfer costs. With the $8.80 you get about 51GB of transfer, so if you use more than that you are better off with Linode.

Stephen

well, you said photos for family members so i assumed there are only a few people actually looking at the pix and bandwidth consumption is rather low.
but yes, basically you're right with your argument, it all depends on your bandwidth and space usage patterns.

i use s3 for my backups, mount it to my file system and then i can use all the standard tools/commands you know and love so getting your data over there is easy.
and in case you have TBs of pictures, they recently introduced a feature where you can send them your HDD and they'll load it onto the account for you. pretty neat but probably not that useful / economical for you.

Unless Linode got local access to an S3 node such that we can mount S3 over the private network, it's not really a viable storage solution.

If getting extra disk storage is such a problem in the host boxes themselves that it has to be sold at 27000% of cost (per year), then perhaps Linode can offer an external SAN service such that we can affordably buy larger amounts of space and mount it over the private network. When the only options are paying 27000% of cost, or upgrading to a bigger Linode, it means that the storage that comes with your linode is pretty much an impenetrable wall.

I just saw this:

http://geekrunvps.com/index.html

They seem to be new and probably immature, but what their offering for disk space is unbelievable. 200G on the "Production" plan.

I'd personally like to see true mix and match type plans because everyone's needs are different. I'm going to test out the cheapest plan and might post back here.

lol directly from the GeekRun 'about us' section:



Somehow a company that professes to be a professional outfit but can't even get their website details correct doesn't exactly inspire me to give them my money.

Agreed. Also there are many links that don't go anywhere and their 888 number has too many digits. I was going to purchase the cheapest plan to play with, but hesitated for those reasons. I sent in a pre-sales question last night and haven't gotten a response yet.

If they do turn out to be legit, I'd like to know how they're offering so much disk space for the price.