Everyone needs different things from their Linodes so what I am about to say will not be an issue for everyone.

However, I have been with Linode since 2003 (well, there was a 3 year period in there where I went to another vendor who had much better system specs on a dedicated system but much, much worse support, and I returned to Linode), and there is one thing which, in this entire time, has been a problem for me and which, despite my hopes that it will get better, has only gotten worse and worse.

That problem is disk space. Disk space very, very rarely goes up on the Linode plans. I was kind of unhappy about the disk space available when I signed up with Linode in 2003. What I did not expect is that it would only get worse and worse over time.

What I mean by that is, the cost of a Linode compared to the market cost of disk space has gotten higher and higher over time. Of course I realize that Linode disk space will always cost more than the raw cost of hard drives, and I don't mind paying a premium for the disk space.

In August 2003, when Linode first started, hard drives cost about $2 per gigabyte. Today they cost around 10 cents per gigabyte. That means that the raw cost of hard drive space has gone down by a factor of 200 in that time.

If Linode matched this same rate, then the 1 GB of space originally offered for $20 per month would now yield 200 GB of space for the same price.

Instead, we have only 16 GB for $20 per month.

Thus, Linode has failed to match the market cost of disk space by a factor of more than 10x over that time period. In other words, Linode disk space is now 10x more expensive than it was in 2003, relative to the raw cost of hard drive space.

Now I'm not saying that Linode hard drive space should cost ten cents per gigabyte-year. I'll be generous and allow Linode a 10x markup on the cost of hard drives. I'll happily pay $1 per gigabyte-year on my Linode. That will be $5 per month for an additional 60 GB of space in my Linode, and I would really be quite happy with that.

I know that it is difficult to fit hard drive space in Linodes. But Linodes have been at roughly the same density for years now and the density of hard drives has increased tremendously in that time. Why can't more dense drives be put into Linodes than were put in 5 or 6 years ago?

It's become a real pain for me to host my personal site on Linode. 24 GB just isn't alot of room for all of the accumulated emails of my family, and for my photos and videos, and my archived data, and all of the stuff that I want to keep there. Just a week or two ago I hit 100% and had to go clean out stuff that I would have rather kept on my Linode, but had no where to put it. Sure, I could probably scrimp around to find more files that I could remove and give myself more headroom but, should I really need to do that? Should I really be trying to cram all of my content into 24 GB at $30 per month? It is, quite honestly, preposterous.

It is only because Linode *does* have very good service and support that I stay. But I feel like I am being stuck between a rock and a hard place; I don't want to leave Linode because I don't want to deal with less reputable hosting sites. But I almost can't stay because the hard disk space is so pitiful. So what ends up happening is I have to juggle and play games with my disk space and files just to fight to stay on Linode. And I feel like I shouldn't have to.

So yay for more RAM, that is great. But my god, will you PLEASE address the hard drive space issue? If you search the forums you'll find that I've pointed this out periodically over the years and nothing has ever improved on this front! (Yes, I know, we have gotten disk size increases, but the fact that Linode continues to fall further and further behind on the comparison to raw hard disk prices has not changed; if anything, it has accelerated over time).

Disk isn't a problem for me, i use about 4gb on one of my linodes (with 16gb space) and 2gb on another (with 24gb space).

Although I do agree with what your saying on the pricing. Have you taken into account RAID, since I think linode runs RAID10 or something like that?

I believe they've always run that way; so whatever markup was sufficient in 2003 ought to be sufficient now, and we still arrive at a 10x (or more) disparity in price versus available space.

Ummm, $2.00 / $0.10 = 20, not 200.


Doesn't seem like they are all that far off your expectations.

Linode could throw up a beefy SAN in each datacenter and sell space as an addon (accessed via iSCSI over the private network) on the cheap.

In effect, you'd get our 16GB of very fast local storage for your $20/mth included, and you could perhaps pay $10/mth to get 100GB of storage on the SAN at lower speeds for bulk storage. The downside of this is that it might make the NICs of the host boxes a bottleneck.

As far as we know, Linode puts four disks into each host in RAID-10, and they're 15K RPM SAS disks. The biggest such drives are, I believe, 600GB, so you'd get a max of 1200GB post-RAID per host machine.

If there are 40x512s on a box, and each has 16GB of storage, that means your requirements are 640GB.

So it looks like Linode could afford to upgrade the 512s to 24GB without much issue (assuming that they had 600GB disks in them), but not really much more. That's not a big increase.

I think you'll find that the reason that Linode's competition offer much more storage space is that they use cheap big 7200RPM drives, while Linode uses high-end 15K RPM drives. It's a quantity vs quality thing.

NAS would load the NICs, SAN wouldn't...

SAN could if they went iSCSI and did not get cards dedicated for storage. SAN does not necessarily imply FibreChannel anymore.

pfft. if it's iscsi, then it's NAS. Calling something going over the NIC SAN is like calling something running OpenVZ a VPS.

Fiber channel may have the performance edge, but as long as the storage is accessed as a raw block device, I think it's more appropriate to use SAN than NAS. NAS implies file sharing protocols are used to access the data at a higher level than a block device.

Both Fiber Channel Protocol and iSCSI map SCSI operations to a remote device, so are very analogous - not to mention that FCP is also used over 10Gbps ethernet.

I do think some SAN storage as an add-on option would be interesting, though not as primary storage, and even if it's a performance hit compared to local storage, doing it over ethernet is probably much easier to retrofit.

For most of my nodes, disk space isn't a major issue, but when it is, having local expansion over SAN would likely work fine. Though I do think the potential impact on the private network would need to be taken into consideration, I bet it would work pretty well.

I think it's come up here on the boards before too, but I wonder if Linode couldn't just re-purpose or just dedicate some hosts to be iSCSI targets, rather than having to invest in and manage separate SAN devices. Might even fit more easily into whatever internal tools they have for managing space.

-- David

Gah, you're right. Something did seem pretty unexpected about those numbers when I wrote them, but it was late and, I'm kind of bad at math.

I hope my math error does not invalidate my complaint. It's still hard to believe that $30 * 12 months = $360 only buys 24 GB of disk space per year.

The content on my Linode does not grow at an unreasonabe rate; and yet I find that year after year I get closer to maxing out my space because Linode disks just don't get bigger very fast. Now I've finally hit the point where without significant effort, I am running out of space.

I'm just trying to make my voice heard here; I'm a customer and I have what I think are not unreasonable requirements; and if Linode doesn't add more disk space soon, I will have to leave, not because I want to, but because I have to. I'll probably just get out of hosting my own site altogether, move my family over to gmail, put my photos onto some free hosting site, and buy a cheap $5/month shell account just to use for those rare occasions when I need a server in the sky to test something.

You could move the data off to S3, you know. Cold storage is pretty cheap there... $0.15/GB/mo, or $0.10/GB/mo if you like to live life on the edge a bit. If you're just archiving photos and such there and don't access it frequently, it's probably a win. $2.40/mo will store your 24 GB of photos with decent availability.

A typical 15000 RPM, 600 GB, hot-swappable, 5-year warranty SAS drive continues to be about $500, so mirrored high-speed local storage is somewhere around $1.67/GB, excluding controllers, power, sleds, and replacement costs. Eventually, I expect drives will get larger as storage scientists can figure out ways to embiggen them without catching fire or decreasing MTBF.

I think you just need to remember the strengths/weaknesses of the service Linode provides. It's never going to give you the best value for money on storage space - they rely on fast drives which simply won't have as much storage.

If you don't mind paying a premium for the Linode storage - upgrade. If you can't afford it - move something off. Maybe move your email to Gmail, move the infrequent content to some other respectable service which is fairly cheap like Amazon S3, or move it to another place which massively oversells like Dreamhost.

Yer. Just signed up for AWS and I think the ofsite storage is just what you are looking for! I don't know what everyone else is running their Linode for, but as a business person I am really happy with the disk size and would rather we kept it small so it remains as fast and reliable. I am new, but I already have my core systems here, and had already made things so that data was offsite. If I was going to host a photo album of my family and stuff, I would make sure and enter values when I installed said family phonto thingy. or make the changes, if the album was more than my diskspace. to put it elsewheres, like Amazon AWS S3. Seriously my friend. take a look

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

I have already moved all of my archived data onto S3. My Linode has mostly just emails and my Gallery site taking up most of the space. The Gallery site is the biggest user by far. My wife doesn't want to be constrained in the number of photos and movies that she can put up, and within reason, I don't think she should have to be.

I have thought about making a really good S3 bucket mounting filesystem for Linux. Then I could have lots of cheap off-Linode storage, and use the local Linode hard drive as a file cache for the most frequently accessed files and as a write cache. There exists already tools for mounting S3 buckets as volumes but the last time I looked (admittedly, a couple of years ago) they were not nearly high quality enough for my required confidence level.

I actually started my own implementation thereof; but I ran out of steam and didn't finish it. I did produce a pretty good C interface to S3 (http://libs3.ischo.com/index.html), and was fortunate that my timing was good and several companies needed the same functionality and spontaneously offered to license it from me. So I made a decent chunk of money on the effort but am still no closer to having a good storage solution for my linode.

Actually I suppose I could just use the money I made from that project to pay for Linode disk space and then I'd have nothing to complain about. At current Linode rates I could buy 50 GB of Linode storage per month for several years with that money. But I prefer to keep that money in my kids' college funds and have Linode suck it up and BUY SOME BIGGER DISKS!!!

I don't want to move. I like Linode in *EVERY* way *EXCEPT* for disk space.