The problem with using logic to follow tech is that logic is typically linear, and tech is geometric. Logic is best applied to tech in the historical sense, freed of failed tech.
Were you there when MFM bowed to RLL? When the disaster that was RLE crashed? When that bifurcated into IDE and SCSI?
If you had been, you could not formulate this question. What do you know?
The underlying hardware of a spinning disc is that it is a disc that is spinning, and the data is rarely under the head when it needs to be read - and SSDs are solid state devices, any block of which can be read as quick as any other because it need not wait for a physical object to spin into position - random reads and writes are the same as sequential reads and writes - more than that: third generation drives leverage abstraction to stripe and spare their internal storage so as to deliver reliable storage within the context of traditional drives despite the fact that they are not even remotely similar.
Son, your InTerNationalUnits meant nothing back when they were inventing this stuff. They said KB and meant 8096 bits. That's 32x32x8, for those who are keeping track, or 2 x 8^4. It bites. That you expect us to keep track of your precious bits by the each only magnifies your fail. It's just not done that way any more. You might as well craft a rug with tweezers.
Look, I know the parent post is going to garner a boatload of hate from the FC SAN people who will protest for various reasons that their unicorns and rainbows magnify the effectiveness of the underlying storage until it's cheap and performant. I'm sorry, but you're all full of it (to be shkind). You need to find a new job.
When you figure the cost of FC storage, the network, the backup, the service contracts and whatnot, it's $30K-120K/TB. You guys got some cool stuff - I'll give you that. But it ain't worth 300x-1200x the price of consumer tech, especially when it lacks the density required for modern apps, and is limited in bandwidth to legacy tech, and can't serve the IOPs that VMHosts need. As it is your validation teams are slacking in approving modern density drives. For what you're asking we could do RAMDisk. Notwithstanding, 8Gbps is barely sufficient to feed one VMHost, let alone a blade chassis full of them.
And tape guys: seriously, it's time to give it up. Get a new job - please.
I probably would have gone with "You can't take and hold ground with bots - to stake a claim requires Men on the ground." But that works.
The bot thing is a distraction. If we don't get our genome off this mudball we're as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later some unpleasantness will occur.
What this really means is that magnetomechanical media is dead.
When you're doing tricks like this to get a few extra bytes per block it means you have run out of physical media density technologies. It's kind of like when they moved the Earth, Moon and stars to get dial-up modems from 48.8Kbps to 56Kbps - redefining bps along the way. It's the End. It's an admission that we're out of magnetic media density improvements. There might be one more but after this but it's over and even now the density isn't even the important thing any more.
I warned about this here several years ago: the consolidation of server workloads leads to an I/O choke point. Next month AMD releases their 12-core Magny-Cours processor and Intel replies with a new processor technology - both of them increasing the memory channels and the amount of RAM that can be configured on a system to over a terabyte. It's on like Donkey Kong in terms of processing and RAM, but all of this tech will suffocate for lack of I/O.
The good news is that solid state technologies are here with sufficient capacity and doubling all of streaming bandwidth, IOPs and storage density at more than an acceptable rate. That they're greener is just bonus. And then there's the fact that the price per gigabyte - while still not competetive with consumer magneto-mechanical media - is coming down at an even better rate and already bests enterprise media (SAS and FC). There will be an accommodation period much like there was when we moved from analog modems to DSL and beyond - and this is a ripe field for the snakeoil salesmen. There will be wrenching pain as we realize that 8Gbps FC SAN doesn't even effectively serve a 5-pack of properly constructed third generation SSD-format drives, let alone an entire rack of them. The world will spin about us as multiplexed 4x SAS V2 (24Gbps) connections become the order of the day briefly, unless Intel makes a coup and figures a way to apply a heirarchical routing structure to LightPeak, which isn't even released yet and even so is obsolete. For sure electrical interconnects are right out - they don't have the bandwidth. We're going optical and I mean right now. 3.5" SAS drives will become the new tape. Tape has already been the new punchchard storage method for several years.
My guess: we'll find a new brand for "Enterprise storage" that uses RAID technologies to aggregate the bandwidth and improve the reliability of flash technologies in a way that doesn't rate-limit IOPs and in a way that provides reliable end-to-end performance and scales to terabits per second, until it becomes a static storage medium that actually reaches the performance of RAM. An interim solution may include huge RAM cache on SAS attached Flash drives backed by supercapacitors for guaranteed commited writes even if the power fails to preserve data integrity at the storage unit level. FC isn't the interconnect solution and SAS isn't it either - it'll likely be derived from external PCIe but be over optical media and probably multiple strands of it.
This is a big change - a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary change. A bigger change is coming. An extinction level event. When we've mastered the IOPs and the storage capacity of everything that everybody wants to store, then what? When every enterprise has consolidated their workloads down to three servers geographically separated for HA and DR, then what? What do we sell them then?
Friends the situation got dynamic. Good luck to you all.
Perhaps it were better if rather than trying to persuade the unconvinced to our way of thinking, we rounded them all up and killed them, or conscripted them into forced labor. That would solve that problem, wouldn't it? Would that make you happy?
If you fail to see the relevance, let me recommend that you read the book. The good Reverend Dodgson knew his climate science, and his math.
... and their sources are the same circular references that got us into this mess. I'm sure that didn't escape you. If you want to show us something, don't be shy: show us what you've got.
Otherwise I'm going to stick with "Algae eat CO2. Crisis averted."
The current analysis uses surface air temperatures measurements from the following data sets: the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998), United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data, and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) data from Antarctic stations. The basic analysis method is described by Hansen et al. (1999), with several modifications described by Hansen et al. (2001) also included.
Do you know why Alice in Wonderland is so oft cited as a reference? It's because it's so oft applicable.
In assessing your enemy it does you no service to believe he is less smart, less strong, less swift than he is. It's better that you over estimate his abilities than your measure come short and he kills you.
Many sceptics are not ignorant, many just don't know or understand the science.
Yeah, and some of us have downloaded the numbers and crunched them. Some of us who used to assume AGW based on reportage and graphs have become interested. We've become interested not because we care, but because the AGW supporters are such pricks. And now we're sceptical because the story doesn't hold water. That piques our interest even more because few intellectual pursuits are as rewarding as slapping a "scientist" in the face with some "inconvenient truth"s.
And when you crunch the numbers raw they don't add up to AGW. When you look at the written history it doesn't agree with the models. Any model you can use to mold actual observations into AGW will yield the same result when fed random noise as input, or Britney Spears' latest album properly scaled. That's not proof. When you look farther back in the climatic record, you find evidence of ages of ice, and before those then periods where the Earth was warmer even than now and gave rise to.. us. That's a history of Genesis, not Apocalypse.
And the closer we look at the evidence for AGW, the more it falls apart. But we need not even look so close because the alarmists have gone off the deep end - claiming an escape to climate infinity in 2007, evaporating Himalayan glaciers, SuperHurricanes and, well, every tin-foil hat climate theory you can think of. That's a situation ripe for parody we can milk for a few decades.
The climate is warming. Congratulations! You've observed that we're in an interglacial age. Now tell us something we didn't know 100 years ago.
I found your problem: "nutjob denialist conspiracy crusade Creationist lunatics". You have a labelling problem. Try labelling them "the unconvinced" and go from there. Labelling people nutjobs does not win friends and influence people. If that doesn't work, try posting some graphs. I hear people have good respect for graphs.
Oh, BTW: I wasn't thinking RAMdisks, but they're still out there and they still rock just as they always did. I know a guy who's using them for some high-end work. I imagine for really high end applications like trading systems they use huge RAMdisks backed by flash memory, and good batteries. We were doing 1M IOPs on RAMdisk over a decade ago and it was hot stuff, I'll tell ya - but RAM is not persistent storage even when it's battery backed, so RAMdisk doesn't really count for storage metrics.
The drive I mentioned has 128MB of buffer RAM. I imagine that might impact the IOPs quite a bit with the testing configuration I was using.
New at HP is 1GB flash-backed write cache. Flash-backed write cache might be a good interim step between SAS/SATA attached flash drives and direct PCIe attached flash drives with huge RAM cache.
Some people are even using really absurd solutions like external PCIe, and shared PCIe. If you have the kind of problem that solves then more power to you, but that's kind of out of my comfort zone.
My point was not that the storage really is that cheap - of course it costs four times what I said if you want geographically diverse replication and that's how I would do it. If you want fiber channel with proactive support, go ahead and multiply the cost 40x or more. And yes, there's no such thing as an infinite resource. That's why I said effectively unlimited, as in it doesn't matter that there's not an shoreless sea of pasta salad behind the "all you can eat" claims at the buffet - if there's more than I can or will eat, we're good.
But the many who use little subsidize the few who use much, and your storage needs are very different from those of a shared hosting provider. I don't have much insight into BlueHost's operations, but they claim 1.9 million hosted domains and over 525,000 paying customers. Look closer at those numbers and you'll see that they have less than 1000 servers, and so they're running over 2,000 domains per server. It's a good bet that the vast majority of those customers aren't trying to store terabytes of data or open the new ebay on a $10/month hosting plan, so the many pay for the few because at BlueHost there's only one plan and only one price. They're not going to try and ding me with unexpected charges because my bandwidth or storage went over my limit one month, because there's not any limit to go over. For some people like me and the people in the article who posed the question saying they have little money, that's comforting. Bluehost claims to only have 20Gbps of aggregate bandwidth to the Internet - I have individual servers with more bandwidth to the intranet than that and you probably do too - and if anything that's where their bottleneck is. But my hosted sites come up just fine, so I don't worry about it.
When you operate at that scale, you get economies of that scale. You don't buy your storage from NetApp, HP, EMC or Hitachi. You don't pay $3K/TB for bare 450GB FC drives and another $3K for the software licensing and hardware and support to run it. You build it yourself from stuff like BackBlaze does it, out of commodity hardware that delivers the storage and IOPs through systems engineering, and redundancy through software. You self-warranty by buying hot and cold spares. You buy 24/7/365 15 second response support by hiring rotating shifts of people whose livelihood depends on showing up at work on time. You step up and be responsible for your own systems engineering when you get that big and if you blow it you're toast, so you take good care. You use open-source technologies like openfiler (has those snapshots you like) and Lustre. And for God's sake you're not doing anything so retro as trying to spool all that stuff to tape. Really: Tape? Still? Google and Amazon and others do it in analogous ways.
These guys know that commercial SANs are not made from magical parts - they're servers and drives and software, crafted with engineering that can be bested cheaply and reliably if you know what you're doing. If you can't meet the engineering and service requirements, you're better off buying the SAN. Even if you can meet the requirements, for most people the SAN is a better deal because their needs don't support the time and effort and so roll-your-own solutions, though cheaper up front, offer poor net ROI over the equipment lifecycle. I have heard it said that the SAN also gives you a throat to choke when things go horribly wrong, but I know guys who think like that and I don't like them and I don't respect them.
Of course shared hosting and BlueHost isn't for everybody, nor is roll-your-own servers, storage and networking. Some h
Server: For that you need a server with a bunch of PCIe x8 slots and a bunch of the PCIe attached SSD devices. FusionIO is a popular vendor, but there are others. IBM has a project where they work on this stuff, but you can buy it off the shelf now. Costs are still pretty high on this one.
As I mentioned before, you don't have to keep hosting and registration at the same company. All you have to do is tell your registrar to use the DNS servers belonging to whatever host you use.. I'm pretty sure they all make that pretty easy -- if you don't you shouldn't use them.
I know that. Getting free of a company like Yahoo when they jack domain renewal prices 300% without telling you is a nuisance. I used to never have hosting and domains from the same provider by policy because I figured that was too much control over my domains for one company to have. I've lightened up about this, mostly because I feel like I'm being treated right by BlueHost - but it's not a religion. The day I stop feeling like I'm getting a square deal of course I'm outta there.
Likewise the rest of your comment... this is an Ask Slashdot. If you don't like Bluehost, say why. If you do or don't like a host, tell the guy why so he can enjoy the benefit of your experience. You don't have to get all over me because you don't like why I like or don't like things. Use your own criteria. You don't have to school me - like I said, I've been around and I know what I like and deciding my criteria is outside the scope of your domain.
As for the no-mixed-hosting thing, that's how I like it. It's not just the sales pitch - I don't want some MCSE geeking on my linux webhost. The command line, it confuses them. And then there's the prospect of the host cutting some deal to go all-windows for "business reasons". That's not as much of a prospect if they're not using Windows at all, is it? Some people need and want Windows web hosting, and for all of me they're welcome to all of it.
Other people don't like the unlimited storage and bandwidth claim. They say it's oversubscribed. Whatever. When they're throttling my bandwidth or dogging me about storage then I'll do something about it. If you want to store terabytes of data by all means use somebody else! If you need to pay more to feel confident you data's being well cared for then by all means do so. Me, I keep my own backups and I'm not saving the world or building the next Amazon.com on my shared hosting plan and it's my guess that's the sort of position where the questions in the fine summary are coming from.
1TB of storage costs $150 including the server. If even 10% of the userbase was such a hog it would still work out fine for them. Apparently they don't have that sort of problem that I know about - it's been advertised unlimited for years now and if they were capping people we'd have heard about it. There would be posts to that effect right here in this thread.
It's not actually unlimited, but it's effectively unlimited storage for hosting purposes. You can't use it for backup. But there's no cap - if you're using it for your website it's permitted. I guess enough people pay the full ride for their mini websites to make up for the piglets. Anyway, it says unlimited right on their home page and nobody's ever bothered me about storage. If one day their word is no good I guess I'll take my business somewhere else. But for now, no worries.
Likewise you don't get unlimited FTP accounts and MySQL databases - but 1000 and 100 is close enough to unlimited for my purposes. Hell, this is starting to read like an ad. If you don't believe me, check it out for yourself.
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
Effectively unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage and MySql databases, email accounts, FTP accounts - multiple user accounts I can lock down to one domain or folder for these because I might want to job out management for a domain or subdomain. Because I never know today what I'm going to be using it for, and this is a long term relationship that's challenging to get out of.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
I like BlueHost. No, I don't work for them but they've been making me happy for quite a while.
I'm actually kind of concerned that there's a shadowy group of corporate advocates purporting to be agents of US policy negotiating international treaties which must remain a secret from the citizens of the respective countries, and the practice is getting serious play in the halls of large governments. I'm not the tinfoil hat type usually, but there's something about this that makes me slightly uneasy.
Give it up already. Vista's a goner. Put him on the cart. Let it go man, cuz it's gone. Requiem. R.I.P. Hasta la Vista baby. Well, bye.
If you must, keep an install CD in your bedroom and take it out and fondle it on those lonely nights when you're sobbing in your beer thinking of what might have been. But for God's Sake, leave the rest of us alone about it. You're embarassing yourself. It's awkward.
I'm sure this works if you're not doing anything important or confidential. If you're handling other people's money or identity data there are different rules. You can lose your own money and identity to hackers and that's your own business - but you owe the other people whose money and personal data you are entrusted with a higher duty of due care.
Except that it was a trap from day one. Every serious IT pro knew it was a trap. There was no attempt made to disguise this trap: Microsoft made it quite clear that they were competing for control of the Web and they considered it an issue of corporate survival - which it was and is. They were and are completely open about the fact that they're integrating these things and interfering with open integration for the direct purpose of promoting their technologies and brands. Like I said in that first post, it's not a secret at all.
That makes it hard to weep for those who invested and still invest their own money, time and intellectual ability to skill up on these technologies and so chain themselves to the oars of Microsoft's galley, doomed to row for the benefit of a corporation that prides itself on fooling others into rowing their boat to their own detriment.
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The problem with using logic to follow tech is that logic is typically linear, and tech is geometric. Logic is best applied to tech in the historical sense, freed of failed tech.
When robots count as Men, we'll have bigger problems than exploration of space.
Were you there when MFM bowed to RLL? When the disaster that was RLE crashed? When that bifurcated into IDE and SCSI?
If you had been, you could not formulate this question. What do you know?
The underlying hardware of a spinning disc is that it is a disc that is spinning, and the data is rarely under the head when it needs to be read - and SSDs are solid state devices, any block of which can be read as quick as any other because it need not wait for a physical object to spin into position - random reads and writes are the same as sequential reads and writes - more than that: third generation drives leverage abstraction to stripe and spare their internal storage so as to deliver reliable storage within the context of traditional drives despite the fact that they are not even remotely similar.
Son, your InTerNationalUnits meant nothing back when they were inventing this stuff. They said KB and meant 8096 bits. That's 32x32x8, for those who are keeping track, or 2 x 8^4. It bites. That you expect us to keep track of your precious bits by the each only magnifies your fail. It's just not done that way any more. You might as well craft a rug with tweezers.
Look, I know the parent post is going to garner a boatload of hate from the FC SAN people who will protest for various reasons that their unicorns and rainbows magnify the effectiveness of the underlying storage until it's cheap and performant. I'm sorry, but you're all full of it (to be shkind). You need to find a new job.
When you figure the cost of FC storage, the network, the backup, the service contracts and whatnot, it's $30K-120K/TB. You guys got some cool stuff - I'll give you that. But it ain't worth 300x-1200x the price of consumer tech, especially when it lacks the density required for modern apps, and is limited in bandwidth to legacy tech, and can't serve the IOPs that VMHosts need. As it is your validation teams are slacking in approving modern density drives. For what you're asking we could do RAMDisk. Notwithstanding, 8Gbps is barely sufficient to feed one VMHost, let alone a blade chassis full of them.
And tape guys: seriously, it's time to give it up. Get a new job - please.
I probably would have gone with "You can't take and hold ground with bots - to stake a claim requires Men on the ground." But that works.
The bot thing is a distraction. If we don't get our genome off this mudball we're as doomed as the dinosaurs. Sooner or later some unpleasantness will occur.
What this really means is that magnetomechanical media is dead.
When you're doing tricks like this to get a few extra bytes per block it means you have run out of physical media density technologies. It's kind of like when they moved the Earth, Moon and stars to get dial-up modems from 48.8Kbps to 56Kbps - redefining bps along the way. It's the End. It's an admission that we're out of magnetic media density improvements. There might be one more but after this but it's over and even now the density isn't even the important thing any more.
I warned about this here several years ago: the consolidation of server workloads leads to an I/O choke point. Next month AMD releases their 12-core Magny-Cours processor and Intel replies with a new processor technology - both of them increasing the memory channels and the amount of RAM that can be configured on a system to over a terabyte. It's on like Donkey Kong in terms of processing and RAM, but all of this tech will suffocate for lack of I/O.
The good news is that solid state technologies are here with sufficient capacity and doubling all of streaming bandwidth, IOPs and storage density at more than an acceptable rate. That they're greener is just bonus. And then there's the fact that the price per gigabyte - while still not competetive with consumer magneto-mechanical media - is coming down at an even better rate and already bests enterprise media (SAS and FC). There will be an accommodation period much like there was when we moved from analog modems to DSL and beyond - and this is a ripe field for the snakeoil salesmen. There will be wrenching pain as we realize that 8Gbps FC SAN doesn't even effectively serve a 5-pack of properly constructed third generation SSD-format drives, let alone an entire rack of them. The world will spin about us as multiplexed 4x SAS V2 (24Gbps) connections become the order of the day briefly, unless Intel makes a coup and figures a way to apply a heirarchical routing structure to LightPeak, which isn't even released yet and even so is obsolete. For sure electrical interconnects are right out - they don't have the bandwidth. We're going optical and I mean right now. 3.5" SAS drives will become the new tape. Tape has already been the new punchchard storage method for several years.
My guess: we'll find a new brand for "Enterprise storage" that uses RAID technologies to aggregate the bandwidth and improve the reliability of flash technologies in a way that doesn't rate-limit IOPs and in a way that provides reliable end-to-end performance and scales to terabits per second, until it becomes a static storage medium that actually reaches the performance of RAM. An interim solution may include huge RAM cache on SAS attached Flash drives backed by supercapacitors for guaranteed commited writes even if the power fails to preserve data integrity at the storage unit level. FC isn't the interconnect solution and SAS isn't it either - it'll likely be derived from external PCIe but be over optical media and probably multiple strands of it.
This is a big change - a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary change. A bigger change is coming. An extinction level event. When we've mastered the IOPs and the storage capacity of everything that everybody wants to store, then what? When every enterprise has consolidated their workloads down to three servers geographically separated for HA and DR, then what? What do we sell them then?
Friends the situation got dynamic. Good luck to you all.
Perhaps it were better if rather than trying to persuade the unconvinced to our way of thinking, we rounded them all up and killed them, or conscripted them into forced labor. That would solve that problem, wouldn't it? Would that make you happy?
If you fail to see the relevance, let me recommend that you read the book. The good Reverend Dodgson knew his climate science, and his math.
... and their sources are the same circular references that got us into this mess. I'm sure that didn't escape you. If you want to show us something, don't be shy: show us what you've got.
Otherwise I'm going to stick with "Algae eat CO2. Crisis averted."
From your own link:
The current analysis uses surface air temperatures measurements from the following data sets: the unadjusted data of the Global Historical Climatology Network (Peterson and Vose, 1997 and 1998), United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) data, and SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) data from Antarctic stations. The basic analysis method is described by Hansen et al. (1999), with several modifications described by Hansen et al. (2001) also included.
Do you know why Alice in Wonderland is so oft cited as a reference? It's because it's so oft applicable.
In assessing your enemy it does you no service to believe he is less smart, less strong, less swift than he is. It's better that you over estimate his abilities than your measure come short and he kills you.
Many sceptics are not ignorant, many just don't know or understand the science.
Yeah, and some of us have downloaded the numbers and crunched them. Some of us who used to assume AGW based on reportage and graphs have become interested. We've become interested not because we care, but because the AGW supporters are such pricks. And now we're sceptical because the story doesn't hold water. That piques our interest even more because few intellectual pursuits are as rewarding as slapping a "scientist" in the face with some "inconvenient truth"s.
And when you crunch the numbers raw they don't add up to AGW. When you look at the written history it doesn't agree with the models. Any model you can use to mold actual observations into AGW will yield the same result when fed random noise as input, or Britney Spears' latest album properly scaled. That's not proof. When you look farther back in the climatic record, you find evidence of ages of ice, and before those then periods where the Earth was warmer even than now and gave rise to.. us. That's a history of Genesis, not Apocalypse.
And the closer we look at the evidence for AGW, the more it falls apart. But we need not even look so close because the alarmists have gone off the deep end - claiming an escape to climate infinity in 2007, evaporating Himalayan glaciers, SuperHurricanes and, well, every tin-foil hat climate theory you can think of. That's a situation ripe for parody we can milk for a few decades.
The climate is warming. Congratulations! You've observed that we're in an interglacial age. Now tell us something we didn't know 100 years ago.
I found your problem: "nutjob denialist conspiracy crusade Creationist lunatics". You have a labelling problem. Try labelling them "the unconvinced" and go from there. Labelling people nutjobs does not win friends and influence people. If that doesn't work, try posting some graphs. I hear people have good respect for graphs.
Oh, BTW: I wasn't thinking RAMdisks, but they're still out there and they still rock just as they always did. I know a guy who's using them for some high-end work. I imagine for really high end applications like trading systems they use huge RAMdisks backed by flash memory, and good batteries. We were doing 1M IOPs on RAMdisk over a decade ago and it was hot stuff, I'll tell ya - but RAM is not persistent storage even when it's battery backed, so RAMdisk doesn't really count for storage metrics.
The drive I mentioned has 128MB of buffer RAM. I imagine that might impact the IOPs quite a bit with the testing configuration I was using.
New at HP is 1GB flash-backed write cache. Flash-backed write cache might be a good interim step between SAS/SATA attached flash drives and direct PCIe attached flash drives with huge RAM cache.
Some people are even using really absurd solutions like external PCIe, and shared PCIe. If you have the kind of problem that solves then more power to you, but that's kind of out of my comfort zone.
My point was not that the storage really is that cheap - of course it costs four times what I said if you want geographically diverse replication and that's how I would do it. If you want fiber channel with proactive support, go ahead and multiply the cost 40x or more. And yes, there's no such thing as an infinite resource. That's why I said effectively unlimited, as in it doesn't matter that there's not an shoreless sea of pasta salad behind the "all you can eat" claims at the buffet - if there's more than I can or will eat, we're good.
But the many who use little subsidize the few who use much, and your storage needs are very different from those of a shared hosting provider. I don't have much insight into BlueHost's operations, but they claim 1.9 million hosted domains and over 525,000 paying customers. Look closer at those numbers and you'll see that they have less than 1000 servers, and so they're running over 2,000 domains per server. It's a good bet that the vast majority of those customers aren't trying to store terabytes of data or open the new ebay on a $10/month hosting plan, so the many pay for the few because at BlueHost there's only one plan and only one price. They're not going to try and ding me with unexpected charges because my bandwidth or storage went over my limit one month, because there's not any limit to go over. For some people like me and the people in the article who posed the question saying they have little money, that's comforting. Bluehost claims to only have 20Gbps of aggregate bandwidth to the Internet - I have individual servers with more bandwidth to the intranet than that and you probably do too - and if anything that's where their bottleneck is. But my hosted sites come up just fine, so I don't worry about it.
When you operate at that scale, you get economies of that scale. You don't buy your storage from NetApp, HP, EMC or Hitachi. You don't pay $3K/TB for bare 450GB FC drives and another $3K for the software licensing and hardware and support to run it. You build it yourself from stuff like BackBlaze does it, out of commodity hardware that delivers the storage and IOPs through systems engineering, and redundancy through software. You self-warranty by buying hot and cold spares. You buy 24/7/365 15 second response support by hiring rotating shifts of people whose livelihood depends on showing up at work on time. You step up and be responsible for your own systems engineering when you get that big and if you blow it you're toast, so you take good care. You use open-source technologies like openfiler (has those snapshots you like) and Lustre. And for God's sake you're not doing anything so retro as trying to spool all that stuff to tape. Really: Tape? Still? Google and Amazon and others do it in analogous ways.
These guys know that commercial SANs are not made from magical parts - they're servers and drives and software, crafted with engineering that can be bested cheaply and reliably if you know what you're doing. If you can't meet the engineering and service requirements, you're better off buying the SAN. Even if you can meet the requirements, for most people the SAN is a better deal because their needs don't support the time and effort and so roll-your-own solutions, though cheaper up front, offer poor net ROI over the equipment lifecycle. I have heard it said that the SAN also gives you a throat to choke when things go horribly wrong, but I know guys who think like that and I don't like them and I don't respect them.
Of course shared hosting and BlueHost isn't for everybody, nor is roll-your-own servers, storage and networking. Some h
SSD: that would be Patriot Torqx M28.
Server: For that you need a server with a bunch of PCIe x8 slots and a bunch of the PCIe attached SSD devices. FusionIO is a popular vendor, but there are others. IBM has a project where they work on this stuff, but you can buy it off the shelf now. Costs are still pretty high on this one.
It's a long and sordid history. Start here Or if you prefer the short story, here. Hanlon's razor does not apply.
As I mentioned before, you don't have to keep hosting and registration at the same company. All you have to do is tell your registrar to use the DNS servers belonging to whatever host you use.. I'm pretty sure they all make that pretty easy -- if you don't you shouldn't use them.
I know that. Getting free of a company like Yahoo when they jack domain renewal prices 300% without telling you is a nuisance. I used to never have hosting and domains from the same provider by policy because I figured that was too much control over my domains for one company to have. I've lightened up about this, mostly because I feel like I'm being treated right by BlueHost - but it's not a religion. The day I stop feeling like I'm getting a square deal of course I'm outta there.
Likewise the rest of your comment... this is an Ask Slashdot. If you don't like Bluehost, say why. If you do or don't like a host, tell the guy why so he can enjoy the benefit of your experience. You don't have to get all over me because you don't like why I like or don't like things. Use your own criteria. You don't have to school me - like I said, I've been around and I know what I like and deciding my criteria is outside the scope of your domain.
As for the no-mixed-hosting thing, that's how I like it. It's not just the sales pitch - I don't want some MCSE geeking on my linux webhost. The command line, it confuses them. And then there's the prospect of the host cutting some deal to go all-windows for "business reasons". That's not as much of a prospect if they're not using Windows at all, is it? Some people need and want Windows web hosting, and for all of me they're welcome to all of it.
Other people don't like the unlimited storage and bandwidth claim. They say it's oversubscribed. Whatever. When they're throttling my bandwidth or dogging me about storage then I'll do something about it. If you want to store terabytes of data by all means use somebody else! If you need to pay more to feel confident you data's being well cared for then by all means do so. Me, I keep my own backups and I'm not saving the world or building the next Amazon.com on my shared hosting plan and it's my guess that's the sort of position where the questions in the fine summary are coming from.
1TB of storage costs $150 including the server. If even 10% of the userbase was such a hog it would still work out fine for them. Apparently they don't have that sort of problem that I know about - it's been advertised unlimited for years now and if they were capping people we'd have heard about it. There would be posts to that effect right here in this thread.
It's not actually unlimited, but it's effectively unlimited storage for hosting purposes. You can't use it for backup. But there's no cap - if you're using it for your website it's permitted. I guess enough people pay the full ride for their mini websites to make up for the piglets. Anyway, it says unlimited right on their home page and nobody's ever bothered me about storage. If one day their word is no good I guess I'll take my business somewhere else. But for now, no worries.
Likewise you don't get unlimited FTP accounts and MySQL databases - but 1000 and 100 is close enough to unlimited for my purposes. Hell, this is starting to read like an ad. If you don't believe me, check it out for yourself.
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
Effectively unlimited domains, bandwidth, storage and MySql databases, email accounts, FTP accounts - multiple user accounts I can lock down to one domain or folder for these because I might want to job out management for a domain or subdomain. Because I never know today what I'm going to be using it for, and this is a long term relationship that's challenging to get out of.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
I like BlueHost. No, I don't work for them but they've been making me happy for quite a while.
I'm actually kind of concerned that there's a shadowy group of corporate advocates purporting to be agents of US policy negotiating international treaties which must remain a secret from the citizens of the respective countries, and the practice is getting serious play in the halls of large governments. I'm not the tinfoil hat type usually, but there's something about this that makes me slightly uneasy.
Give it up already. Vista's a goner. Put him on the cart. Let it go man, cuz it's gone. Requiem. R.I.P. Hasta la Vista baby. Well, bye.
If you must, keep an install CD in your bedroom and take it out and fondle it on those lonely nights when you're sobbing in your beer thinking of what might have been. But for God's Sake, leave the rest of us alone about it. You're embarassing yourself. It's awkward.
I'm sure this works if you're not doing anything important or confidential. If you're handling other people's money or identity data there are different rules. You can lose your own money and identity to hackers and that's your own business - but you owe the other people whose money and personal data you are entrusted with a higher duty of due care.
On release IE6 was the best browser available.
Except that it was a trap from day one. Every serious IT pro knew it was a trap. There was no attempt made to disguise this trap: Microsoft made it quite clear that they were competing for control of the Web and they considered it an issue of corporate survival - which it was and is. They were and are completely open about the fact that they're integrating these things and interfering with open integration for the direct purpose of promoting their technologies and brands. Like I said in that first post, it's not a secret at all.
That makes it hard to weep for those who invested and still invest their own money, time and intellectual ability to skill up on these technologies and so chain themselves to the oars of Microsoft's galley, doomed to row for the benefit of a corporation that prides itself on fooling others into rowing their boat to their own detriment.