I periodically think of trying to incorporate S3 for some aspects of my storage, but each time I look I conclude that it's not really all that cheap, once I take into account costs for actually performing updates. Though a much more static read-only long term storage would probably still be good.

BTW, you may already have seen this, but the last time I considered it again, I was intrigued by s3backer (http://code.google.com/p/s3backer/) and its design as a pure block storage device, rather than some of the other filesystem-approaches. And it can leverage local disk as a cache perhaps similarly to how you are thinking.

Of course, as a block device you may also risk heavier I/O charges compared to something that manages the S3 buckets differently, but there are some knobs to help with that as well.

-- David

Maybe it's just me, but I see everybody doing comparisons to how much it costs to purchase a particular physical drive. Unless things have changed, isn't that really just a small part of the equation of putting a hard disk or storage in to a data center for online access?

I think the point we're trying to make, and that you're not quite getting, is that they don't make bigger disks. The release date on the 600 GB drive I mentioned was September 2009, so most of the drives out there are probably 300 or 450 GB.

Linode probably isn't going to spend $2000/server plus downtime to replace the disks in hundreds upon hundreds of servers with the same model of hard drive at the same time, either.

OK, then, I would also be happy with fast-ish local network storage, that someone else pointed out as a possibility. What is the reason that that couldn't be done?

Um.....money?

Although this thread has seen reasonable action for this forum, nobody else has chimed in with a "me too, I need more storage".

I don't think the average VPS/LINODE user needs mass storage, and for the few that do (like you), it's not worth the capital investment (and maintenance, and management, and monitoring, and accounting) for Linode to provide such a service.

If Linode thought they could make a profit, don't you think they'd already be discussing the Storage Rollout Plans?

I guess I never really thought of myself and my usage of Linode as not being part of the target market ... I started my Linode in 2003 and I never really realized that its target audience grew into the group that you referenced.

So I guess that Linode may not, in fact, be ideally suited for me after all if that is the case. I am not sure what my alternatives are, though. Like I said, perhaps I should just get out of hosting my own stuff. "Vanity" web sites and photo galleries are pretty "2000's" I suppose in this day and age of Facebook and other social media sites. I guess I should just roll with the times and accept that hosting your own server just isn't as prevalent as it used to be.

People have a good point here - that 10 cents a gigabyte is for 7200RPM drives, not the 15K ones linode uses.

Maybe you would be better off doing your mass storage somewhere that uses cheaper drives if performance isn't as much of an issue.

FWIW, when I joined in 2004 I had a linode 64 with 3Gb disk (+1.5Gb free for yearly). Now I have 512 with 16Gb (+8Gb free - grandfathered plan). So memory has increased 8-fold and disk 5.3-fold.

I think that says more about how technology has changed; my non-scientific gut-feeling is that memory prices have dropped quicker than disk.

However I do think linode need to be careful; 512Mb of RAM is a massive amount for $20/month. It's more than some real-colo solutions provided a couple of years ago! People might start expecting physical server type resources as a result, which is clearly wrong - it's just a virtual server. Expectation management is key to customer happiness and linode may raise false expectations by providing so much memory.

Not that I'm complaining

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

SAS drives are crazy expensive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... AS%206Gb/s

Reminds me of some guys at work who don't understand why we can't just buy a $100 SATA harddrive from newegg whenever one of the servers need more space.

That being said, I'm tight on space on one of three Linodes and I'm starting to look into S3 to store less frequently accessed media files.

Eh, why not.

Me too, I need more storage (and I'm too cheap to purchase more!) :)

More storage might be nice but not essential I use aws for any big stuff that needs hosting, the only thing I'd like more disk space for is mysql storage since I can't really CDN that. But I'm still happy with what we have since I'm pretty sure linode's disks are top notch in speed so size will be smaller, I've been with other hosting companies (both managed and unmanaged) and they've never had the IO performance of linode.

I'll add a +1 for more storage.

That said I too have looked into S3, and implemented Persistentfs mapping an S3 bucket back to my Linode, sym linking it as a directory.

Not a very efficient workaround, I have to account for bandwidth in and out and the resultant latency.

But it got me around a space issue for a download manager that I find a little bit perplexing (I'm using IPB Download manager for a hobby site) and doesn't make using a CDN easy for a fledgling php'er like me.

But the RAM upgrade is most welcome!

personally I prefer the RAM and the 15K RPM to a bigger disk running at 7200 RPM.
If they will give us more disk space by downgrading to 7200K I think that I will not be happy.
Think also that only 16Gb of disk space requires only 60$ for a 4 slots backup and this is another plus for me.

$0.02

This. Maybe you could edit your first post to correct this and try to improve your argument. (I assume we can edit past posts here).

While the move from 1GB to 16GB in those years is good, I agree with you, BTW, that it would be good to have more disk space, provided that - given the elite RAID 10 and 15k etc hardware - I wouldn't want Linode to skimp in other areas, particularly customer service.