S3 has three fundamental problems:

1) It's expensive. Using it for anything but long-term archiving is *REALLY* expensive. You have to pay four times for any data; first for the space to store it, second for the requests to get/put it, third for the S3 bandwidth to access it, and fourth for the linode bandwidth to access it. Using it for anything but archival storage is probably cost-prohibitive.

2) It' slow. All the benchmarks I've seen show it as being too slow to use as active storage. Again, probably not useful for much beyond archival purposes.

3) It's not ACID, meaning it *can't* be used for reliable storage when mounted. This means that if you write a block/file and read it again, you're not guaranteed to get back the same thing as you just wrote.

Number 3 is the killer; S3 is designed as a distributed system to handle large load, not be read like a consistent filesystem. And since S3 *isn't* consistent (when you write data, it takes time to propagate among nodes, and there's no guarantee that your read will hit a node that has the same data), it's very risk to use as a filesystem. Again, probably not bad for archival purposes where you write a lot but almost never read, but not good for an active filesystem.

Yeah S3 isn't designed for active use, I use it for backup purposes only. Costs me 4 bucks last month to store backups for over 6 months so it's very good for that!

Then again, no network file system is going to be as snappy as a local one :/ 7 months till linode turns 8 maybe bigger disks will come then

Disks, schmisks and memory, schmemory - what I need is a few dozen more CPUs.

"Massively multicore, massively multicore, wherefore art thou, massively multicore?"

James

Why? We already get far more CPU power than at most other VPS providers, it's pretty rare that we as Linode customers hit up against CPU bottlenecks.

Of course, since Linode is (or was) using quad-core dual xeon servers, they could double the core count in their future dual-processor systems.

By its very nature, my web site is sometimes CPU-bound with only four cores available:

http://zunzun.com

The site does not tend to become memory-bound or IO-bound. I could actually make good use of many, many more CPU cores now that I make heavy use of parallelization for the mathematical calculations the site performs.

James

I currently use Google App Engine for all my storage needs they have the best price ratios for storage and bandwidth not to mention the best network I can find.

I would like to see a SAN solution for linode though

What do they charge for storage? Their published prices from 2008 are higher than Amazon's for storage (but cheaper for transfer), but they don't seem to publish any current pricing anywhere.

I guess you run some sort of app that exposes the storage for external use?

This is hilarious - these researchers used my web site in their paper on 1000+ massively multicore chips. Listed as reference 42 at the end of the paper.

http://www.eecs.northwestern.edu/~harda ... models.pdf

Your site seems like it would trivially scale horizontally; unless your memory requirements are high, multiple linode 512s would seem to fit the bill.

Let's split this 50/50: you pay for them and I'll use them.

James

That's a very rare usage for VPSes. I'm skeptical there's enough people with similar needs to make your usage work targetting. Frankly, if you get multiple linode 512s and you can peg all their CPUs, you're getting an amazing deal because nobody else is doing that. They're worried about shared disk bottlenecks while you have the CPUs to nearly yourself, at a far lower cost than would be required for your own quad-core server.

For the rest of us, we'll be thrilled when BTRFS is stable, because we'll be able to use the compression features to trade plentiful CPU for scarce disk and disk I/O.

There are lots of instances that could require large storage pools without the resources that expensive dedicated servers provide. The storage upgrades that Linode does offer are ridiculously low, and almost insulting.

I run about five medium-sized websites from my main linode, and on my most popular one I provide music mixes which range from 90-200mb uncompressed. I average about 25,000 pageviews a month and hover around 300-500GB transfer a month. Storage is a MAJOR problem for me as I don't wish to delete any of my old files. These are very rare files (it's a niche genre) and I'd like to maintain an archive indefinitely, which requires more and more storage.

I understand that there are a variety of storage solutions, even compressing/archiving music files would quadruple my storage capacity but I like the end-user to experience instant gratification. I also understand I could just get basic webhosting packages or a service like Amazon AWS but I'd rather send my money to Linode. I've been with Linode for years and the uptime, speeds, and support I've received doesn't make me want to go somewhere else.

I can't be the only case either, the following situations would require storage outside of current capabilities of Linode without the resources that a dedicated server would offer (at quadruple the price)

- Any type of File hosting/Repositories that continuously grow

--- Media streaming or serving
--- Custom software projects
--- Image uploading/serving
--- Personal backups (storing PC files on your Linode)

- Rapidly growing databases.

--- Highly active forums such as vBulletin quickly eat up space.
--- Archived statistics (detailed traffic history for your site)
--- Large-medium sized businesses with new customers

I'm not suggesting to change the base storage options for the VPS lineup, as it's fair for what most people do. I am suggesting that the storage upgrade options be increased dramatically while still managing a fair price. Surely some sort of cloud storage option is available at this point in time (its 2010!) which could allocate more than a few additional gigabytes storage to a customer.

Maybe I'm crazy but I'd like to see decently priced 100GB+ upgrade options.

Yes,it'd be nice to have more spaces.

http://code.google.com/apis/storage/docs/overview.html#pricing

Seems OK for storage