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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!
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
The most important thing to remember is uptime. It's the business of these companies to make your data available to you. This means redundancy, uninteruptable power supplies, dedicated bandwidth, monitoring, phone support.... You get the point. Hosting and data storage companies are a lot more than your buddy down the street throwing an extra drive on his DSL line. When looking at a host, remember what else they do and compare that. You can get quite a bang for the buck(s).
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Has anyone tried them? Any thougths.... good, bad, indifferent?
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