You should check out s3backer. Admittedly, I've not used it, but I discovered it when researching S3 myself, and it seems to solve the problems you mention.

Edit: just noticed there was another page of posting where s3backer was already mentioned. Sorry.

Me too, I need more storage!

The RAM upgrade is nice, in the sense that it's better to have it than to not have it. Honestly, I don't expect to notice the difference.

I've also been a customer since summer 2003, straight through, and over the past couple of years, disk space has been a constant headache.

The last bump was over a year ago. I'm having to seriously consider moving to a dedicated server. I've found a place which offers one for $50/month, with 500GB disk space. Think of it!

Of course it's only a dual-core Atom, but what I need is DISK.

We offer more disk. It's called: upgrade your plan.

Cheers,
-Chris

For those of an Ubuntu persuasion looking to use s3backer for bulk storage but not wanting to compile stuff, I've created an updated PPA of the latest source distribution (1.3.1):

https://launchpad.net/~rtucker/+archive/s3backer

If you're using lucid (10.04 LTS), just:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rtucker/s3backer

Or, if you're using hardy (8.04 LTS), add this to your sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rtucker/s3backer/ubuntu hardy main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/rtucker/s3backer/ubuntu hardy main

Once you've done either of the above, simply update and install as per usual:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install s3backer

You can then follow the nice instructions at this URL to create a 1 TB ReiserFS filesystem, adjusting parameters to taste. If you're using something other than hardy/lucid, let me know and I can wave a chicken accordingly.

No warranty, if it breaks you get to keep both halves, I may or may not update it if I hear of a new release, etc. I haven't actually done any performance testing with it yet, but I'm thinking of ways to do that.

My understanding is that with S3, you can't really be guaranteed that a read will return written data after you write it, because the data may not have propagated yet to the node that you end up reading from. So any S3 mounting app would need to have a rather large write buffer that is maintained long after data is written...

I've heard reports of S3 being used for POSIX operations to be quite slow, although my experience from home with Dropbox (which is S3 backed) is pretty fast... Still, the whole "uses your bandwidth" thing is a bit of an issue.

You have to remember drop box keeps a copy of what you're syncing locally so it doesn't have to rely on contacting the s3 systems.

I use s3 for backup purposes only, it would work well as a CDN, but for a generic file system it is way too slow.

Sorry, I thought this was clear from the discussion but you seem to have missed it somehow.

I am asking for more space at the same price as what I pay now, or at a reasonable incremental increase in price. Your offer that I should pay an extra $10 per month for 6 GB of space is lame.

Believe me, I know that if I don't like the price, then I can go elsewhere; so no one has to remind me, thanks.

Donate today to the Council of Storage Technology Scientists, who are closer than ever to breaking the 600 GB threshold and allowing our disk allocations to increase by perhaps 4 to 6 GB within the next few decades!

Not to be constantly correcting your numbers, but if you upgrade plans your $10/mo gets you 8GB of disk space.

And if you don't like the price, oh nevermind...

Thanks for the correction - I seem to be highly math impaired on these forums.

post edited, talking in a civil way is always better than fight.

I guess linode just has to make a profit don't they?
you could go with burst.net
I guess you get no support. At linode you are probably paying for support mostly.

Trolling much?


And no overselling. If everyone fills up their 250 GB, there's gonna be trouble.

_________________
/ Peter

I can understand why disk can be a problem. People tend to allocate all their share so there is no overlapping as it is with CPU or bandwidth.

Disk is more like RAM - everybody allocate all he can even if he doesn't use it and thus it is expensive. I, for example would be able to live with 8G of 16G most of the time but it is not possible to resize image on fly so I have allocated whole 16G.

Yeah, I'll throw in too for the call for improved disk space. It's the only thing that makes my Linodes feel underpowered.

Chris' answer to this was pretty flip, IMO. No matter how-which-way you upgrade your Linode, you're paying between $1.25 to $2/month/gigabyte.

By contrast, other folks have figured out how to build storage for $.12/GB, one-time cost (plus maintenance & initial development): http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/.

After looking at setups like that, Linode's price/gig hurts a bit.