Slashdot Mirror
Why is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive?
dhclab49 asks: "Recently, I wrote a data-driven web application for a customer, and when it came time for them to select a hosting company, what I found was that most hosting companies charge a LOT for disk space. Most of them have accounts for $10-$30 per month, a bit more if you add in a database account. However, they almost all limit you to around 250MB of disk space, with extra space costing like $1/month per additional MB of storage. The app I wrote manages the customer's workflow and is meant to allow them to generate PDF documents and store them online, so I really need a few gigs. In an era where hard disks cost about a buck a gig and are getting cheaper by the day, how can hosting companies charge $1000 per gigabyte per YEAR?! And are there any alternatives out there for hosting a data-driven website at a reliable datacenter with a few GB of space for under $500/mo?"
Because they CAN, that's why.
:)
Your solution: Co-Location! Mmm, co-looooo...the very word makes my tummy quiver.
Also note - if you're storing files that big, you're probably, oh, I don't know, transferring them, too - so watch out for those bandwidth fees - they're a killer!
disk space for gigabytes worth of data is a relative non-issue --- it's possible for home machines to hold a terrabyte or more worth of data. the question is, how much does it cost to back that data up? my dad sells storage area networks and tape backup systems and i can tell you that there's a lot more than just having some monkey cpio / tar the filesytem --- there's a lot of potentially very expensive hardware and software involved for full backup stuff. just my $0.02
Anyone who has or currently works in the hosting industry knows there is a lot more to the cost of operations than just HD space. Of course, when you use the word, "Datacenter" are you then talking about high-speed SCSI drives in some sort of RAID array? With that, even HD's can get expensive. Colo is the way to go, just setup a cheap server with big IDE drives and maybe an ARAID or something and get someone to stick it in their room for $200 a month.
If you put up 2-3 megs of html, you aren't going to cost the company lots of bandwidth. Well, you would need a LOT of page impressions to come up to anything substancial.
However, if you're allowed to put up 200MB of the latest Family Guy episodes, the isos of your latest homebrew linux distro or whatever, you're likely to be costing that company a pretty penny in the near future.
Naturally, this is all compounded by the threat of a slashdotting or similar.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I have a server with 60GB's of raid 0 for 30 bucks a month in a reliable datacenter. They give me 4U's of space for the server too. The place I'm with will even build a server for you.
I highly recommend them as one night something went wrong with a lilo update and their tech support ended up building me a new lilo.conf file with echo. When I phoned them they already new that my server had failed to properly restart so they gave it another restart and when it failed to restart they awaited my call for instructions.
http://www.tera-byte.com/colo.html
Colocate your own hardware...when you buy "hosting", you're also paying for admins, backups, lease payments on hardware, etc.
Also, one size doesn't fit all...a lot of these hosting packages are setup for the average "sell 'em cheap, stack 'em high" customer...and you're a bit of an exception to that.
-psy
I think it has a lot to do with bandwidth. Although harddrive space isn't expensive, bandwidth is. Hosting services operate on the premise that the more space a site takes, the more things there are to look at (not an entirely stupid assumption) and no bigger sites use more bandwidth. The problem is that some sites (like yours) are big because they are archives and won't consume as much bandwidth as a "normal" site of the same size.
I'd try looking for a hosting service that will let you pay by bandwidth rather disk space. Or look into hosting the site yourself.
Umm if you can afford $500/mo you should just contact one of the big companies (AT&T, Verizon, SBC, etc.) and have them install a dedicated T1 line and host the damn site yourself.
In fact you should create your own hosting service and have your clients pay you to host their sites.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Advertising on Slashdot is bad karma. Mmm-kay?
Plans aren't always set in stone, and if they own the boxes they have a lot of opportunity to be flexible. Furthermore, most of them are making it prohibitive to add space because they know that many people who will want it will be looking for warez/mp3 server...
However, you need a colocation service. If you're going to be doing that kind of computation, a shared server just isn't going to work for you.
Contrary to popular belief, disk space can be expensive and fast, big disks are really expensive. While IDE family of hard drives are very, very cheap and quite large, they aren't very good for high volume server applications. Instead of going to pricewatch, go to dell.com and price out a big net appliance disk with a fast interconnect. Hmm, a quick check shows a dell 770N net attached storage box at $14K with only 800 Gigs (raw). Hosting (hosing?) many domains on a single computer is going to require really fast disk, not just a single 5400 rpm drive....
-Sean
I hate to do this but you guys really seem at a loss here. I have unpublished hosting plans that would be perfect and cheaper than you realize. hit my url and call me. g'luck.
pretzel_logic
You're used to 'home storage' prices. Look at pricewatch, find a good brand of EIDE, and just get it.
They're looking at 'enterprise storage'. We have 11 tera of raw disk on an EMC. It cost $2 million. The useable storage out of it is around 3-4 tera, after counting mirroring, and third mirror break off for backups, etc, etc, etc.
These drives use MCA (iirc) interconnects to a disk backplane, and fiber channel interconnects between disk boards and the front end san switch. The computers are fiber connected into the san switch as well, and the JNI cards (client end of a SAN connection) for this are NOT cheep.
To Online storage companies, downtime costs serious money. They can't afford the downtime. That's why their storage costs real money. Then they pass it on to you.
If you need real amounts of data, you don't want a hosting service, you want a CoLo service (They give you rack space, and an internet connection. You provide the box). If you want, you can put a desktop with 2x140 gb drives, and you'll get what reliability you can out of it (most IDE drives are warrenteed for 1 year for a reason). If you want the thing to last, get a server class, rack mountable server from (dell|compaq|ibm|penguin computers). You'll be happy you did. Mirror the drives (preferably in hardware) so you can loose a disk without killing your service.
Zapman
A buck a gig? No. For a simple home computer, a standard IDE drive is acceptable. That is about a dollar a Gig. For a good hosting service, they need something fast and reliable, like high speed SCSI RAIDs. Those cost significantly higher.
If the hosting service is good, then they could even have multiple servers serving your data for speed and reliability. That means possible replication. If they don't and you still have a lot, then that means a server for just you. That costs quite a bit of money.
Backups also cost money, and the hosting companies will probably do those. Once again $$$.
Then there is an issue of transfer. If you store a lot, that probably means you transfer a lot. Add in a per Mb cost for transfer, and you will see that the prices do really add up.
So basically if you want something custom, do what the posters above suggest, and colocate your own server. That way you can do absolutely anything, and will only be paying only the monthly fee + bandwidth used.
Good luck in your search.
badness 10000
Because disks are cheap but backups, power, controllers, arrays, racks, floor space and *technicians* are all still expensive. Be very wary of any company that offers "cheap" disk storage; they're almost certainly inexperienced and/or untrustworthy. $1000/gig sounds about right.
It's about things like backups, raid, and power. I host my own box on the net, I got 100 gigs, but I pay all the bills and do the backups myself. There are few things that a hosting company can charge for, bandwidth is uniform and like water. CPU speed is a nebuous factor (not the net nobody cares how fast it sceams). On the other hand Disk space is measurable and has some overhead. A gig in a home system is cheap, A gig in a NetApp with daily backups isn't.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I'll give ya access to my DSL box :-D. Use all the bandwidth ya want!! :-p
--Bryan
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I have noticed the same thing - cost for disk space seems way out of line but the answer in part is that it costs that much because people are willing to pay for it.
But don't assume that raw disk cost is the most important factor. ISPs generally host lots of sites on a bunch of pretty generic standardized boxes.
Here are some other factors that will drive the cost up:
Good hardware: RAID/hot-swap/SCSI is going to cost a lot more than a discount IDE drive.
Maintenance: It's not just the cost of a single drive - it's the parts and labor cost of replacing failed units as well.
Backups: Whatever you store they have to backup so they have to consider all the costs associated with data protection.
Machine capacity: If they have sized their standard machine to host, say, 200 sites and partitioned out the data space accordingly then you can think of someone who uses 10 times the normal data quota as really using up 10 users worth of capacity on that machine as a whole. Where there are bandwidth guarantees a similar situation exists.
I'm sure there are other considerations as well but considering the price pressure on ISPs these days I'm sure that you could find plenty who would offer cheap disk space to get you as a customer if they would make money doing it.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
A friend of mine and I are starting up a company called PDXcolo.net. We're using User-mode Linux to host virtual machines, where you get your own copy of the distro, your own RAM, etc., on a shared machine. You get full root access to the machine, and can (within reason) do anything you want with it. Our base packge (for $20/mo) includes ~64MHz of proc, 64MB of RAM, 2GB of disk (your distro is *not* part of that unless you make significant changes), and 10GB of transfer per month. Additional disk is only $1/GB/mo, and bandwidth is $1.50/GB. 'Machines' are available in power-of-two multiples of that basic config, so far up to 8 'slots', or 512/512/16/80. More can be arranged special-case.
If you're interested, email beta@pdxcolo.net and we'll get you set up soon (merchant account troubles are our main slowdown right now) on our initial machine. That box has 2x 200GB disks in a RAID-1 config. We're planning on doing something on the order of a 3x RAID-5 arrangement on all new hardware, and/or a significant SAN setup.
Our machines are located in a well-respected datacenter in downtown Portland (hence 'pdx', our airport code), and as we build up our infrastructure daily backups will be available over and above the RAID on the hosts. We've got one circuit so far that we've pushed to 25Mbps, an d will be adding more circuits as we get our first customers.
So, if what you're doing doesn't require mega processor or RAM usage, but lots of disk, you might consider using one of our virtual machines to host your app.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
best i've seen so far
JohnCompanies - Collocation Services
thor
It's the same with any service you want to buy on the internet (or in real life, for that matter). If you don't want to spend time looking and just type something up in google and click the first link - you will have to pay more. I wanted a domain name for example. There were plenty of people offering domains for something like $30 a month. But looking a bit harder - and i bought my domain for $8. Same with hosting, i think. If some people do not realise the value of a dollar versus a MB of disk space and are prepared to pay OR simply don't have the time to look for alternatives and prefer to pay and forget about it - why not charge them?
It's true that many hosts limit base users to about 250 megs -- some even as low as 100 megs (hell, my IMAP box hits that if I don't purge in a week).
That said, I've been extremely happy with Pair Networks, who has continually upped our max space over the years I've been- and most of my clients -- have been -- with them. Ridiculously high uptime, for what it's worth.
$30 for 600 megs ('webmaster' account)really doesn't suck.
Give them (and their co-lo/Quickserve) plans a look.
No, I don't work for them -- but I am one really happy customer.
Why not? Because you're too expensive. $149 setup + $149/mo for a basic dedicated setup? Sure, I pay $300/mo at Rackspace for a critical web based application server. And I pay $300/mo for rotated tape backups (totalling $600/mo), but that's Rackspace (meaning, trusted quality). I'm using Dantor.com for my backup server and front line corp info web server. $100 setup (within a business day), $70/mo for a similarly spec'ed machine as your $149 box. Sorry to burst your bubble, but your service is closer to a Dantor than a Rackspace...
I'm sure that everyone will be submitting their favorite hosts, so here's mine.
United Hosting
18 bucks a month for a gig of space, 34 bucks a month for 5 gig, and all sorts of other plans. You also get unlimited MySQL databases. Although they don't offer telephone tech support (they're based in the UK, and most of their clients are in the US) their support has been great! They have fast turnaround time on their ticket system, and are quite responsive through IM clients.
I've been so impressed, I even advertise them for free on my company's site.
If you want the IM name of one of their owners (who I talked with pre-sale and who has personally handled some of my tech support issues), just email me at userid:neil domain:wehneman.com and I'll pass it along to you (with his permission of course).
United Hosting is also pretty much an exclusively Linux shop, for those added brownie points.
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
For $100/month you can get a box at Rackshack with 60GB of hard disk space all to yourself. Plus 400GB/month transfers which should be more than enough. Granted, the $100 deal is only for a Celeron 1.3GHz box, but faster machines are available for a little more money.
I've got one of those servers with them now, and their support is really quite good, and the connection has been rock-solid.
1) Buy hard disks at $1/gig
2) Rent disk space online at $1000/gig/year
3) Profit!
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Oh, I dunno about that. Someone gave him +1 Informative.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
In an era where hard disks cost about a buck a gig and are getting cheaper by the day, how can hosting companies charge $1000 per gigabyte per YEAR?!
The hard disks that cost about a buck per GB are not the disks you would be getting from hosting companies, not if they're doing their jobs right. Large-capacity storage arrays from EMC, HP, and IBM cost in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars, for storage on the order of 20-40 TB. Admittedly, this is high-end storage and likely not storage you get in your colo or local ISP (although, there are some), but even in the mid-range disk storage business high-uptime RAID arrays are not running a buck a GB.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
1GB of downloadable stuff (say an iso image and some extras) 3000 downloads a day. (say it's a common app) Say, 360 days uptime a year :)
About 1 petabyte transferred in a year.
That IS something worth $1000, isn't it?
If you need a personal "harddrive space on the net" though, that's a different matter, only you and a few friends (or company partners) will use it - just arrange transfer limits... or set up a DSL 24/7 linux at home.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
You can get a dedicated server with a 30 GB Disk space, and 60 GB of transfer for $249 a month with Pair Networks. Solid network and uptime. Most server problems are rectified in less than 10-15 minutes(That includes full replacement if nessecarry), and they haven't had a full network outage in over 7 years.
Basically they are just a really good company to work with.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Pair, nor do I get anything for referals I'm just a very satisfied customer.
I have a "Bulk Reseller" account over at VenturesOnline so that I can host a bunch of domains. It comes with a gig of disk space, and 20gb transfer, and they have bigger BR plans (up to 2.5 gigs/35 gig transfer for $65).
If I had quite a few gigs of data, I'd get a dedicated server (either a real one or a "virtual" one).
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
It's not exactly hard to setup an apache web server, you can very cheaply have several gig's of storage and the only requirement is a reasonably fast internet connection.
Depending on the traffic you are looking at... the more traffic, the more expensive the connection but it's almost always cheaper than paying hosting fees to someone else.
The other added benefit is that you know what backup measures are taken... any internal pdfs from the site will be transferred via the local lan where bandwidth is magnitudes cheaper, and the webserver is guaranteed to support all the technologies you need, database, perl modules, etc. If you don't know how, hire a geek to come in a for a couple hours and set it up, it won't cost more than $200 (if that) to pay the labor involved in setting up a decent webserver and since it is in fact a solid linux server it will sit and run for the next 3yrs (provided none of your cgi apps is poorly written and trashes the box.) then you may have to reboot it to squeeze another 3 out of it.
are dreamhost.com and pair.com
You'll ruin EVERYTHING!
The reason it's like that is because every time someone notices, they start their own hosting company, fuckwit!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Just go with one of those places with unlimited space.
Having worked at providers and doing my own providing, my suggestion is to go for a co-located or dedicated server.
Those fees pay for the salaries of the employees included but not limited to Systems Administration costs, electric, air conditioning, bandwidth, and server resources. The more disk space you use the more likely your account is to be a strain on the server.
Users with 1 gigabyte of disk space are very likely to stress the system more than a user with a 16 megabyte account. Perhaps this isn't always true, but it is true statistically (not counting the spammers and script kiddies who always get cheap accounts and abuse them until they're booted).
The original poster built a web-based app that generated PDF files. Anyone know of good open-source examples of this sort of app? It sounds like something I've been looking for.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Do you really need to store the pdf files all the time? or could you just generate them when you need them? That could save you a lot of space.
there are a quite a few dedicated hosting providers for $99/mth, as a lot of people have mentioned backups cost, and these companies don't seem to offer backups.
I personally use serverbeach.com and am very happy with their service (I was quite amazed when they emailed me to tell me that they were sticking to their SLA [giving me a month at half price] when they had a small failure the other day), it's a very DIY setup which has been a very good learning experience. My server has 40gig hdd and 400gigs of data transfer, I've yet to figure out a good way of doing backups (is rsync going to be best way to do it very cheaply?)
if you are certain that a virtualserver is what you are after, I can also recommend phpwebhosting.com, I used them for a long time and they never said anything when I used a quite a bit of disk space (400megs), not sure how happy they'd be with you using gigs of space.
heh, ever thought of reading the ads on slashdot? They're right there across the top of the screen!
well some of the advertizers, ServerBeach comes to mind, will give you a complete machine, with a 60 gig drive for 99 dollars per month (450 gb transfer)
this machine can also be used for things like mail, ftp, or whatever
99x12=1188/60=19.8 per gb per year
and that's not just disk space
Buttsex.
A lot of people will say its because the providers are using more expensive harddrives than the average home user, and that might be true in some cases, but the majority of small providers are going to be using the same ide harddrives that you would use at home.
My theory is that they limit the space to indirectly limit the bandwidth used. I know a site that I administer for a friend of mine has something like 5 gig bandwidth transfer for free included in the monthly hosting price, but really it would hard to use that much bandwidth with the amount of content that can be stored in the space that you are allotted.
I'd like to see some kind of online comparison of the major providers' services.
-cost/month
-control panel?
-MBs
-monthly traffic
-how many subdomains
-how many email/aliases
-can I do stuff.example.com vs. example.com/stuff
What gets me more is the price most of these companies add to a monthly bill to increase the memory of a dedicated server (and I guess they keep the actual hardware chips too).
Why is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive?
Why is espresso so expensive? Repeat after me, kids: Because you pay for more than just the cost of ingredients! Paying for espresso you pay for everything, like the real estate, employees, advertisement, marketing, music, furniture, equipment, atmosfere, etc. Isn't that kind of obvious, for people on SlashDot, who I believe have higher IQ than the average Joe Drunk?
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Assume they give you 250 megs of HD space. If you are using that much online, then that's potentially a lot of bandwidth that is going to hit their server, assuming everything you upload is for a website.
I don't think people tend to store their files on a hosting service in general, and that's why its so spendy. Everything you upload is potentially "public domain" and going to be availabe, sometime, for download.
My hosting company gives me only 200 megs, but 4 gigs of bandwidth, which I use almost every month (averaging about 100+/- megs downloaded a day)
Ever look at banks offering "free checking" (no minimum balance, no monthly fee, etc.)? The banks are getting rich on it - $0.00 minimum balance means loads of customers bounce lots of checks - at $20+/pop "overdraft fee". Many of 'em have lots of other fees - for using an ATM, too many or too few transactions, etc.
Similar for the arbitrary, horribly complex, and ever-changing pricing rules that airlines use to maximize their revenue.
Many hosting companies are doing similar things. The first (sounds big) GB's of bandwidth are really cheap, more is at a $$$$/MB rate that a drug lord would be too honest to charge. Ditto disk space.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
1000$ for 1GB for a year? I guess you didn't look very hard, or didn't look into virtual servers.
There have probably been other posts about this so far, but you should look into virtual servers. (You get your own entire server to control completely, though you don't own it) Here's one off the top of my head:
http://rackshack.net - 99$/mth for a Celeron 1.3, 60GB HDD, and 400GB monthly transfer
I had seen another that was 99$/mth for a Celeron 1.7 with 500GB of monthly transfer, I can't recall the address now.
Here Here!
I hope JNI folds soon.
I'm so glad QLogic is kicking their ass in the Sun market.
I'm also recommending QLogic -E(MC) certified cards to my EMC customers.
We're not held captive to that crap anymore!
The Emulex LPUTIL has to be the single least intuitive POS configuration utility I've ever seen in a Fibre Channel product (and that's saying a lot considering the Brocade mgmt interface)
disgruntled SAN d00d.
Striving to achieve a lower state of conciousness
Has anyone tried them? Any thougths.... good, bad, indifferent?
This post cannot be rebroadcast without the express written constent of Major League Baseball.
network connections, bandwidth, support, disk space, reliability of systems, as well as a ton of other things that you would not want to do. but if you want, you can buy your own server and colocate it in a data center starting at a few hundred a month, then you'll have disk space you want, but then you have all the headaches of supporting that hardware and server software
Cyberbite Networks - Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Colocati
As someone who has both worked for several ISPs and co-owned another, I can assure you that disk space, as well as the use of any other resources does in fact cost money. The catch is that a typical web site will be under 2MB and you can easily host 1000 small low-traffic web sites on a single low-end server. Just one user that needs a gigabyte of storage isn't a big deal, but when all 1000 of your users need that much space it really adds up. Combine this with the fact that enterprise storage solutions cost a lot more than consumer products. While anyone can go to CompUSA and buy a 150GB IDE hard drive for $200, the same thing in a hot-swappable scsi version will cost upwards of $1200 each, and you lose around 25% of your capacity due to RAID5 and hot spares in your array. If you use a fibre channel solution, double the cost of your drives again.
OTOH, there are cheaper solutions. Alternatives include "dedicated server" (you get root/Administrator access and administer it yourself) or "dedicated managed server" (the hosting provider retains root/Administrator, administers it for you, but you still have a whole machine dedicated to you). A dedicated server can actually be fairly cheap because it can use cheaper IDE drives. If you can handle some downtime when a drive fails, most dedicated hosters can have you back up soon on a whole new machine. IMHO, that beats colocation where your access to replacement hardware is whatever you put there, and may have to do it yourself. Just be sure you have a specific time commitment from your hosting ISP with regard to time to replace failing hardware, and have a backup plan. Double the price and you can have a 2nd server hot online with replica data, ready to go, or even serve load balanced. Some hosters may even provide a "backup spare" server at less than full price.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What? No referral program for their customers? And I was hoping I could help pay for a dedicated server that way.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The web hosting market space leaves little room for profitability in default configurations. The problem is, you HAVE to get a low price or people will ignore you. I've seen absurd offerings like 50 gig of bandwidth and 300 meg of space for $5 per month. There's no way this is cost effective...50 gigabytes of bandwidth is the equivalent of 154 kbit per second. Get 7 people actually pushing at that level and you'd have the equivalent of a T1's bandwidth for $35 in revue, which at least around here is a $565 loss.
So you oversell. Of course you oversell...chances are 95% of your users will never hit that level. If they do, you make sure your service agreement has a "drop you at any time we like" clause. No problem. It's sleazy, but people never pay their bandwidth bills...shit, i owe my old co loc something like $500 and they never even bothered to send a bill, they knew I wouldn't pay it.
Disk space is another issue entirely. People will definitely hit their disk space limit, so you can't oversell it. And the people doing it will be content creators -- just the people likely to pay for additional play. Charge them up the ass, offer then your "second tier" service, and you've got a single client stuck on your service AND paying you more money for roughly the same support costs.
Of course, you *COULD* just buck the whole thing and charge what you like, or a percentage above what things actually cost you and your company. You can do sophisticated math on how much your time is worth vs. how much time you spend doing tasks and assign a value based on that. You're not going to have much success, but if you have quality service you'll get a few people anyway.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Thanks.
Domains for only $8.75/year! Transfer your domain for on
My company has very affordable prices, however they are VERY appealing to those wanting to peddle warez. The only way we can provide these prices are limiting the content to content you own the rights to. $12.49 gets you 5gb of space, 25gb bandwidth, with CPANEL, PHP, MySQL, Perl etc.. If you're interested check out: http://whydefy.us/
I work at a hosting company, so I know a few things.
The cost of expensive disks (scsi) versus cheap (ide) is not really the issue.
Most customers host on a shared hosting environment. That is, there are perhaps 100s or even thousands of customers on the same computer / cluster. This means that disk space for all the customers needs to be available on that computer.
Now assume for simplicity, we are using cheap ide 100 G drives that cost $100. If a customer wants 100G, we could cover this expendature for roughly $100. However, a 2u rack mount computer can only hold 3 hard drives. So if 3 customers need this much space, now we need to buy a whole new server to house this disk space. This means the cost of a new computer, plus more rack space at the data center (not cheap).
Of course, we dont use $100 ide disks. And we need to backup up the data, and there is the labor of installing and maintaining the new hardware, etc.
Using Raid5 means that you basically could only get a little more than 1 such customer per server (using 3 x 70G scsi drivies)
disk space might be getting cheaper, but associated costs are not.
You're a pathetic stalker.
Love,
Esther
Ask your local mom&pop ISP if they have an empty bay in their web server and just buy a big harddrive.
Of course, you'll still have to worry about bandwidth costs.
I can't speak for other ISP's, but one of the reasons we charge what we do for disk space is because of sustained throughput issues on bandwidth.
IE: the more space you need, the more likely you are to load it with large files. The larger the file, the longer it takes to upload it to the net.
The longer it takes to upload, the less overall bandwidth available to the host. The less overall bandwidth available to the host, the more bandwidth the host is required to have. The more bandwidth, the more cost. blah blah blah.
Generally an ISP will price bandwidth cheap and try to make the money back on the diskspace charges.
Of course the other reason ISPs charge what they do, is because they can.
Obviously, you're either not willing to, or in a position to host all that data yourself.
Simple supply and demand.
Just once, I'd like it if someone called me "Sir".
Without adding, "You're creating a scene."
You might wish to check out: http://www.webhostingtalk.com.
There are several forums there where people go to ask questions about various web hosts, and also get quotes. It's a quite active forum and generally, a good site for this type of question, IMHO.
Get a semi-dedicated server/VPS. Since those plans aren't cramming hundreds of sites on a server, they will offer more space.
e.g. my company offers a VPS plan running User Mode Linux (UML) with 4GB of space.