A nice feature of VPS.net is that they offer bolt-on storage nodes for a VPS at a reduced cost, because the storage node doesn't consume RAM/CPU time. From what I understand it's just space mounted on their SAN.

I believe it's something like $10 for 25GB.

Is this something Linode would consider?

It dosen't seem likely based on this thread: http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5713

I can say that the lack of storage space is going to drive a friend of mine to the competition; he needs to store 30-40GB (migrating from a home server) for $30/mth or less.

The $20 linode with $10 SAN access would fit the bill, but since there are no affordable disk upgrades...

Linode is losing customers over this.

Thanks Thmo I noticed this um...blunt reply from caker regarding someone else asking about increased disk space.

Originally I'd posted the request in the suggestions part of the forum in February and since it wasn't even acknowledged I'd assumed Linode weren't interested in receiving suggestions.

Guspaz you're right. Originally I'd wanted to use Linode for web-hosting, but the disk space isn't feasible any longer.

What are you hosting that you need the space for, if it's videos/images/whatever use an offsite CDN like amazon s3, it's cheaper in the long run.

I've only got the basic 16 gig box, 1gig goes to tmp. 256mb goes to swap and the rest is /, out of the 15 gigs I'm using 75% of / which includes some site backups held locally.

As for VPS.net I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole, before I joined linode I tried to sign up for one of their $1/day plans to test them out, my account was "suspended for verification" for almost a day, they didn't send me an email why, I couldn't contact support via tickets I had to email, I posted on the forums and the next day got a reply on there and via email asking for me to FAX (yes fax..who has a fax in 2010?) a copy of my credit card to them....I quickly gave up and went to linode, no problems over here!

For me, extra storage would be nice but there's no way the lack of it is going to move me else where.

Well maybe there was a problem with your credit card or something. I had a different, more pleasant experience with them. Everything worked without a problem.

Then I switched to Linode because of different boot profiles and additional distributions. Now I'm happy here and I only use about 50% of disk space, so this is not a issue for me.

Offsite S3 is very slow and extremely expensive. Comparing the original proposal of 25GB of space for $10 to S3 (assuming 2:1 transfer:space ratio in 32KB reads/writes, with a 10:1 read/write ratio):

25GB storage: $3.75
5GB transfer in (S3): $0.50
44GB transfer out (S3*): $6.60
50GB transfer (linode): $7.50
1,474,560 read operations: $1.47
163,840 write operations: $1.64
Total: $21.01

So, that's not really good, it's almost as expensive as just getting a larger linode, which is not possible if you have a budget.

*: First 1GB of S3 transfer out is free, also ignoring any overhead here

Maybe.

But they're also "losing" customers because they don't have Windows VPS, or because people want cPanel, or because people don't like Green Squares, etc.

You can't be everything for all people.

Even a "trial run" in just one data center, or even just a few cabinets in one data center would cost several thousand dollars. Add in the labor cost of setting it up, maintaining it, billing costs, and for the low additional storage prices that were bantered around in this thread - Linode would be looking at a very lengthy break even point. And of course we all expect it to have air tight security (and 99.999% uptime) right?

As a business - they have to decide if that's the best investment of their time and money.

Playing devils advocate, so you're wanting Linode to provide storage at a rate that is less than what a mass market commodity storage provider is willing to offer?

The two scenarios I can see are where you need more active disk space for databases or frequently used files, in which case a plan upgrade would be the best option. If you're looking to warehouse a large amount of data, it would probably depend on the type of data, but you're probably going to want to look for multiple solutions. Your typical shared hosting provider often quotes unlimited or ridiculous amounts of disk space, but there's also several reasons why they are able to do so which may not be desirable.

They never even got to see my credit card details, I tried to pay via paypal, I "thought" that a $1/day paypal payment would have been easiest just for testing, apparently not.

Do you have a verified PayPal account? Anyway, PayPal is less secure and companies usually don't like it. It's quite rare to find a VPS hosting company that offers PayPal payments (Linode, Slicehost, Rackspace Cloud and AWS don't support them).

Yeah it's a verified business paypal account, they never even got to the taking payment stage from paypal, as soon as my account was created it was suspended and the next day they asked to see my credit card, not very professional IMHO.

How much time and effort (and disk space!!) was sunk into the backup boondoggle, which spent years getting to a usable state, and surely had an enormous break even point. Could we just have that space allocated to our nodes please? I don't need Linode to do my backups for me. I need Linode to give me more disk space.

Boondoggle? I think not. Awesome takes time.

Sorry but we don't have plans to offer a storage service at this time.

-Chris

IMHO I'd say from a business point of view backups will attract more customers, it was one of the reasons I chose not to put a client on here but on slicehost instead a year or so ago, they need a nice and simple point and click interface to restore from if it breaks, now linode has the backup system they can attract less technical users which will be happy that if something busts they can restore their server back to a working state with a few clicks.