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Data Storage The Almighty Buck

Why is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive? 110

Posted by Cliff from the are-backups-and-bandwidth-really-THAT-expensive dept.
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 is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive? More

Why is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive?

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  • why? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:12PM (#6019555)
    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!

    • Re:why? (Score:2)

      by Micah ( 278 )
      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.

        • Re:why? (Score:2)

          by Micah ( 278 )
          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.
    • 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).

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

    by blackcoot ( 124938 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:13PM (#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 @08:28PM (#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).
    • You're right that there are many more costs involved than just disks. I run a "hosting" company and extra space is $5/GB per month. Here are the factors that go into providing that space though.

      - High-capacity SCSI disks. A 75 GB IDE is $77, whereas a 73.4 GB SCSI is $157 on pricewatch (not that you can get them anywhere near that cheap from Dell, where they cost $400).
      - RAID setups. Besides just SCSI we use RAID-10, meaning we get half the amount of usabable disk space per disk we buy. We also have to buy
    • Third thing after backup space and admin cost is a balance between processing power and storage space. More space you use - more CPU (in average) you need, so there no reason to put more than 2x120Gb (one HDD for backup and and one for user data) to typical hosting server ( Linux [linux.org]/FreeBSD [freebsd.org], 2GHz CPU, 512Mb RAM). Maximum domains is about 300 per server, to keep CPU load at 0.3-0.4, Ok, OS requires about 5-10 Gb, another 10Gb we hold for reserve and 100Gb we will use for customers data. This means that we can of

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

    by GenBradly ( 528592 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:16PM (#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.

    • C'mon, anyone who has to ask slashdot such easily solvable questions shouldn't be running his own server. Go with a dedicated server. Here's one for $250/month [pair.com]. They'll keep your OS up to date, do the backups for you, and you can continue with your webmonkey expertise.

      One thing's for certain. If your website is important enough to pay over $100/month for it, you shouldn't be using shared hosting.

  • Bandwidth. (Score:3, Informative)

    by labratuk ( 204918 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:16PM (#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 @07:16PM (#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! (Score:2, Redundant)

    by psyconaut ( 228947 )
    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

  • Bandwidth (Score:2, Informative)

    by Descartes ( 124922 )
    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
    • I think it's more than that. When you go on these plans, you're on a machine with literally hundreds of other websites. Sure, you can get an 80 gig hard drive for $1/gig, but how much does it cost to get an 800 gig hard drive? No one wants to have their static IP address change, so what happens when more than a few people are all asking for gigs of space?
      • Uh, I don't get it. You think hosting providers are buying 800 meg harddrives so they don't have to change their static IP addresses? It don't make no sense. And anyway, who cares about static IPs, I mean if your paying for a domainname what difference does it make what number it resolves to? Hosting providers are buying the biggest, cheapest, drives their servers can handle. Period. I think you could make the argument that trying to host hundreds of multiple gig sites might be too much for our little s

        • Uh, I don't get it. You think hosting providers are buying 800 meg harddrives so they don't have to change their static IP addresses?

          First off, 800 gigs. The point is, if they let people upgrade to say 8 gigs of space for such a low price, and 100 people on the same box did it, how are they supposed to accomadate such a space requirement?

          And anyway, who cares about static IPs, I mean if your paying for a domainname what difference does it make what number it resolves to?

          Absolutely. IP address chang

  • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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 @07:22PM (#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 =)

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

    by Zapman ( 2662 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:23PM (#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.
    • JNI cards blow. I had some Sun E4500's that all used JNI SBus cards. With the system at run level 0 and sitting at the prom they were still talking to the rest of the loop and freaking stuff out.

      Go with Emulex instead.

      EMC stopped supporting JNI cards anyway.
      • 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.
        • 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
          • Lets take this offlist, I've got a question about the EVAs and the Auto RAID function

            slineyp at hotmail dot com - thanks

            but you are right about spreading your data and I/Os around.

            The reason customers pay a large fortune for EMC / HDS systems is that they're designed to get ungodly performance (cache based RAID) and that near-mythical "five 9s" availability (redundant disks, cache, backplane, power, etc).
            It seems to be a disagreement in design circles about using modular arrays like the EVAs as nearly a
    • $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
  • 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.

    Backup

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

    by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:24PM (#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.

    • Hmm, makes me wonder. www.compuwebnetsolutions.com have been offering web hosting for $0.878 per gigabyte bandwidth and $0.087 per MB of storage for a few years. We have cheaper plans but don't advertise them. As for reliability redundancy is rated at 99.999% our actual down time has been 3 hours in 3 years. I didn't realize we were running cheaper than the average hosting per storage. The cost is set for the monitoring, administrators, and overhead i.e.: power, Internet backbone connection, back ups,
    • I just don't see how the price can scale linearly with the amount of space. $1000/month standing charge plus ($10/month)/gigabyte would be more reasonable.
      • I just don't see how the price can scale linearly with the amount of space. $1000/month standing charge plus ($10/month)/gigabyte would be more reasonable.

        That does sound more reasonable. It would be interesting to see a cross-section of prices from the market. A competitive market should drive prices down; it would be nice to know whether the $1000/GB price was competitive or exorbitant.

  • It's not about diskspace (Score:3, Informative)

    by infonography ( 566403 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:25PM (#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 @07:27PM (#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.
    • 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.

      It's actually more that that. if 250 megs is the maximum for a site, then they likely expect most sites to average much less than that, say 100 megs (to make the math easy - it's probably much less than this). so if you need 10 times t

  • One option (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Omega Hacker ( 6676 ) <omegaNO@SPAMomegacs.net> on Thursday May 22, 2003 @07:35PM (#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.

    • Interesting, I was just there for a wedding and picked up a few design/hosting jobs on the side.

      Where in downtown is it anyway?
  • best i've seen so far

    JohnCompanies - Collocation Services [johncompanies.com]

    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 a
  • 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

  • United Hosting (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Landaras ( 159892 )
    I'm sure that everyone will be submitting their favorite hosts, so here's mine.

    United Hosting [unitedhosting.co.uk]

    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

  • Rackshack.net (Score:2, Informative)

    by ErnieD ( 19277 )
    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.

    • If you intend to transmit any email from your server, you might want to reconsider and look elsewhere. There are spammers in the midst, and that means that at least some of the address space is blocked by who knows how many blacklists and/or networks. And they have never responded to my reports that one of their spammers was sending spam to me at a rate of 25 to 30 an hour continuously for a 3 week period (I had to access-list deny them at the router).

  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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 @09:35PM (#6020521)
    You'll ruin EVERYTHING!
    The reason it's like that is because every time someone notices, they start their own hosting company, fuckwit!
  • 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 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.
  • 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 da

  • The Ads man (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Drakon ( 414580 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @12:22AM (#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
  • 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

  • Providers (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @01:06AM (#6021592)
    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

  • 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?

  • I was thinking the same thing.. it doesn't make sense that they'd give you so little hard disk space, but one reason I can see now is because of bandwidth.

    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

  • 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 bi
  • 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

  • 3.75 hosting??? (Score:2, Informative)

    by spuke4000 ( 587845 )
    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?

  • 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
  • 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

    • 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.

  • Because they go ya... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dasmegabyte ( 267018 ) <das@OHNOWHATSTHISdasmegabyte.org> on Friday May 23, 2003 @03:04PM (#6026189) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • We can offer you what it is you are looking for (for well under $500). This would include 24/7 support, a dedicated server, multi-homed bandwidth, and much more. Please email us if interested here [mailto].

    Thanks.

  • 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 fo
  • 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 band
  • 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 [rimuhosting.com] offers a VPS plan running User Mode Linux (UML) with 4GB of space.

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