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Why is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive?

Posted by Cliff on Thu May 22, 2003 05:59 PM
from the are-backups-and-bandwidth-really-THAT-expensive dept.
Data Storage The Almighty Buck
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?"
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  • why? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tumbleweed (3706) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:12PM (#6019555) Homepage
    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!
    • 1) Buy hard disks at $1/gig
      2) Rent disk space online at $1000/gig/year
      3) Profit!
    • Co-location is OK for some people, but overkill for most, as I found out.

      I had a colocated box for the last two years but just gave it up in favor of a virtual server from 65535.net. Costs about a third of my colo, does everything I need, and you don't have to worry about being responsible for the physical hardware.

      Extra disk space is $3/GIG per month IIRC. Not bad.
      • They look interesting, but I'd be worried about connection problems due to them being on the other side of the planet from me. Excellent pricing, though.

        Also, they seem rather new - that makes me nervous, as well.
        • Their high end Linux server is hosted in the US (San Diego I think, but could be wrong). That's what I have.

          Yeah they're somewhat new. It's been good so far. We'll see how it goes!
          • I ran a traceroute (w/o lookup) and it was only one hop more than to my current provider, so yeah, it's almost certainly in CA somewhere. That's cool.

            My current provider (I left Hurricane Electric late last year after some problems with them) is glypto.com - they're quite good, though they don't have the kind of pricing that 65535 has. They're new, but not quite as new-server-smell new that 65535 is. Still, ya gotta start somewhere, I guess.

  • cost of backup + admin? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blackcoot (124938) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:13PM (#6019570)
    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

    • Re:cost of backup + admin? (Score:5, Informative)

      by BrynM (217883) * on Thursday May 22 2003, @07:28PM (#6020107) Homepage Journal
      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).

  • There is a lot more than just HD cost (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GenBradly (528592) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:16PM (#6019586)
    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.

  • Bandwidth. (Score:3, Informative)

    by labratuk (204918) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:16PM (#6019590)
    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.

  • Get your own server (Score:3, Informative)

    by m0rph3us0 (549631) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:16PM (#6019591)
    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
  • 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.

  • Uhhh..... (Score:4, Informative)

    by smoondog (85133) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:22PM (#6019635)
    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
    • Hmm, then go to Apple.com and check out the Xserve RAID and realize that for bulk storage like storing pdf's 7200rpm IDE disks in RAID are more than fast enough. $11K for 2.5TB is a much better price =)
        • Trust me the uptime for an IDE RAID system is probably going to be within 1% of the SCSI system if built with quality components. If it wasn't I doubt EMC could get away with selling them, nor could NetApp, IBM, etc. The only thing faster spindles gets you is lower seek times which mean exactly didly for most applications, database servers and webservers with high amounts of small files being hit in a non-sequential manner are about the only applications that demand ultra-low seek times. As to fast, the XSe

  • Home storage vs enterprise storage. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Zapman (2662) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:23PM (#6019639)
    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.
    • $2M/3.5TB=$570/GB.

      It would seem like the poster's requirement - $500/month for a few GB of storage should be possible from a $2 Million tera-data solution.

      If you factored in separate bandwidth charges for uploads and downloads, you could account for backup requirements.

      Assuming 25% utilization and an eight-month simple payback, I would think that $300 would be possible for the raw storage, plus another $300 for bandwidth.

      • That's base price. Add stuff like service contracts with EMC, service contracts for the servers (IE: Sun), the network switches/routers, backup systems, the sysadmins and network admins salaries, marketing costs, management salaries, etc... and the figure goes much higher.

        Excuse teh language, but it really pisses me off when some clueless hack spouts out "when you can by a harddrive for less than a buck a gig" in such situations. Go ahead, use IDE for intense disk access and see how long it takes before
        • QLogic 2gb cards just kick unholy ass!

          I've got 'em driving a bunch of HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays -- probably the best modular-type disk array on the market, bar none.

          Quite frankly, I just don't "get" things like the HDS 9980. Why would I want to put all my eggs in one basket, when I can have multiple EVA's for less? That keeps downtime isolated .........

          --DM

  • Look At The Whole Picture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nathanh (1214) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:24PM (#6019646) Homepage
    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?!

    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 not about diskspace (Score:3, Informative)

    by infonography (566403) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:25PM (#6019658) Homepage
    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.
    • Bah, it maybe more expensive then a bunch of IDE disks but even a base f880 cluster + Storagetek of comparable size is only pushing $300K, and thats for like 4TB of space, still only $75/GB. Now that doesn't include tech time, but that should be about 2 hours per month max for tape changeout, those techs must make a bunch more than I did as a tech because that still leaves a heck of a lot of profit margin in for hundreds per month.
      • Your seeing this from the retail costs, in order to make money they need to charge something. If they don't make money they don't stay in business. Where do you think the got that $300K? I don't use hosting companies, I got my own and I know how to manage it. All in all it's a mindless arguement. If you need to grouse about the rental costs of a few hundred megs of disk space online, maybe you should get your own box in it's own rack.
  • I'll give ya access to my DSL box :-D. Use all the bandwidth ya want!! :-p

    --Bryan

  • Because people pay it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by linuxwrangler (582055) on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:27PM (#6019671)
    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.

  • One option (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Omega Hacker (6676) <omega@omegac s . n et> on Thursday May 22 2003, @06:35PM (#6019713)

    A friend of mine and I are starting up a company called PDXcolo.net [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 [mailto] 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.

  • 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 [pair.com], 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 --
    • I've been with pair.com for four years, and my experience has been great. They do use regular IDE disk drives (last I checked), but uptimes are great nevertheless (ten minutes a year downtime as a reasult of hardware issues on my own hosts, plus one or two scheduled facility moves and major OS upgrades).

      I also agree that pair.com has been good about increasing quotas to reflect realistic costs. I've never felt like I was being hosed just because they could get away with it.

      However, I still agree with th
  • For $100/month you can get a box at Rackshack [rackshack.net] 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.
  • 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
  • You can get a dedicated server with a 30 GB Disk space, and 60 GB of transfer for $249 a month with Pair Networks [pair.com]. 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 [venturesonline.com]" account over at VenturesOnline [venturesonline.com] 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).
  • 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
  • are dreamhost.com and pair.com

  • Shhhh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord Bitman (95493) on Thursday May 22 2003, @08:35PM (#6020521) Homepage
    You'll ruin EVERYTHING!
    The reason it's like that is because every time someone notices, they start their own hosting company, fuckwit!
  • 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 a
  • 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.
    • oh hey, how about we search the web before asking?
      heh

      http://www.cpan.org/author/FTASSIN/PDF-Create-0.01 /

      And

      http://www.pdflib.com

      actually I didn't search the web, I searched portage... but *shrug*
  • 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.

  • The Ads man (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Drakon (414580) on Thursday May 22 2003, @11:22PM (#6021403) Journal
    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

  • Providers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pipingguy (566974) on Friday May 23 2003, @12:06AM (#6021592) Homepage
    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
  • 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 n
  • I haven't tried these guys, or know anyone first hand that does, but 3.75 Hosting [75-hosting.com] seem to offer pretty cheap hosting. I've been toying with the idea of moving to them. They charge $3.75/month and give 100Mb space, at 1 cent per Mb per month for additional storage. That's still $120/year/Gb, but it isn't *so* bad.

    Has anyone tried them? Any thougths.... good, bad, indifferent?

  • 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
  • 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.
    • Last I checked you are looking at $900+ a month for the T1 and associated equiptment to get it out to regular ethernet from AT&T, don't know about anyone else but that is almost double his $500/month just for the connection, then you have the sever on top of it.

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