Why is Hosted Disk Space So Expensive? 110
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?"
why? (Score:4, Informative)
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!
Finally, a business model that works! (Score:5, Funny)
2) Rent disk space online at $1000/gig/year
3) Profit!
Re:why? (Score:2)
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.
Re:why? (Score:2)
Also, they seem rather new - that makes me nervous, as well.
Re:why? (Score:2)
Yeah they're somewhat new. It's been good so far. We'll see how it goes!
Re:why? (Score:2)
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.
Also, the price of memory (Score:1)
cost of backup + admin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cost of backup + admin? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:cost of backup + admin? (Score:1)
- 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
Re:cost of backup + admin? (Score:1)
There is a lot more than just HD cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is a lot more than just HD cost (Score:1)
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)
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)
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
Re:Get your own server (Score:1)
Colocate! (Score:2, Redundant)
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)
I'd try looking for a hosting service that will let you pay by bandwidth
Re:Bandwidth (Score:1)
Re:Bandwidth (Score:1)
Re:Bandwidth (Score:1)
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
Re:Bandwidth (Score:1)
$500/mo??? (Score:1)
In fact you should create your own hosting service and have your clients pay you to host their sites.
Re:$500/mo??? (Score:2)
Talk to them. (Score:2)
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)
-Sean
Re:Uhhh..... (Score:2)
Re:Uhhh..... (Score:2)
Home storage vs enterprise storage. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Home storage vs enterprise storage. (Score:1)
Go with Emulex instead.
EMC stopped supporting JNI cards anyway.
Me Too Post (Score:1)
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.
Re:Me Too Post (Score:2)
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
Re:Me Too Post (Score:1)
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
Re:Home storage vs enterprise storage. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Home storage vs enterprise storage. (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Home storage vs enterprise storage. (Score:2)
Ummm (Score:1)
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)
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.
Re:Look At The Whole Picture (Score:1)
Re:Look At The Whole Picture (Score:2)
Re:Look At The Whole Picture (Score:2)
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)
Re:It's not about diskspace (Score:2)
Re:It's not about diskspace (Score:2)
$500/mo? (Score:2)
--Bryan
Because people pay it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Because people pay it (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:One option (Score:1)
Where in downtown is it anyway?
JohnCompanies - Collocation Services (Score:1)
JohnCompanies - Collocation Services [johncompanies.com]
thor
It's actually quite simple (Score:1)
Re:It's actually quite simple (Score:1)
Some hosts... (Score:2)
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 --
Re:Some hosts... (Score:2)
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)
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)
I've got one of those servers with them now, and their support is really quite good, and the connection has been rock-solid.
Re:Rackshack.net (Score:1)
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).
For PC storage, your numbers are right (Score:2)
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
bandwidth. (Score:1)
Pair Networks (Score:2)
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.
What? No referral program? (Score:1)
What? No referral program for their customers? And I was hoping I could help pay for a dedicated server that way.
I get a gig of space for $35/month (Score:2)
If I had quite a few gigs of data, I'd get a dedicated server (either a real one or a "virtual" one).
roll your own... (Score:2)
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
my favs (Score:2)
Shhhh! (Score:5, Funny)
The reason it's like that is because every time someone notices, they start their own hosting company, fuckwit!
Sure (Score:1)
the in crowd. (Score:2)
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
Off-topic (PDF apps) (Score:2)
Re:Off-topic (PDF apps) (Score:2)
heh
http://www.cpan.org/author/FTASSIN/PDF-Create-0.0
And
http://www.pdflib.com
actually I didn't search the web, I searched portage... but *shrug*
What about rethinking your design. (Score:2)
cheap dedicated box hosting provider (Score:1)
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)
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
bandwidth.. (Score:1)
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)
-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? (Score:1)
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?
bandwidth (Score:1)
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 heard of "free checking"? "Airline pricing?" (Score:1)
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
Virtual servers (Score:2)
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)
Has anyone tried them? Any thougths.... good, bad, indifferent?
you are paying for (Score:1)
Disk space DOES cost money... (Score:2)
OTOH, there are cheaper solutions (Score:1)
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)
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.
Reliable Web Hosting (Score:1)
Thanks.
Legal Content, Cheap Hosting (Score:1)
Limits (Score:1)
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
Buy a Harddrive Cheapskate (Score:1)
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
A web forum for webhost issues: (Score:1)
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.
Semi-dedicated (Score:1)
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.
Re:Hosting Companies? (Score:2)