Disk Space Blues

We have the Web Server Disk Space Blues - again! It might not be known - maybe not even obvious - but GFF does use a lot of space. A lot!

We have many, many pages (thousands actually), many, many pictures (thousands, actually) and a host of other files to support the site, deliver content and serve our audience.

GFF occupies a bit more than 350 megabytes as it is. Not that much for a large site, but enough to make us a big league player in the hunt for web space.

GFF is hosted on a server somewhere in the US with a service provider whose disk space policy completely fails to make sense with me.

Now 350 megabytes is what I move on a really slow day on my local system. A plain cd contains twice that much.
I have a netowk set up in my house with a web server, a file server and my workstation. On top of that I have a notebook, as does my wife. And the kids have a pc for games. In that small network - big for an average family, but none the less small - I have about 500 gigabytes of disk space. More than a thousand times what GFF needs.

Now, disk space is about the cheapest commodity you can get when it comes to computers. An 80 gigabyte hard disk with room for about 300 GFF's will run you about US$ 70.-. Let me tell you what that is: that is inexpensive storage!

That's why I wonder why our web service provider - a web hotel in the Interland group - at one point charged us a surplus fee of US$ 5.- per extra megabyte per month that we exceed our 350 megabyte limit!
Five bucks per megabyte! Per month!
That compares to the aformentioned 80 gig disk drive costing about 4 million dollars! Every month!

Talk about easy money!
Expenses:
Hardware: 70.- (life span a couple of years)
Installation: 100.- (that's an hour - it can be done in 10 minutes)
Income: 4,000,000.- (per month)
Margin: a gazillion percent!
Maybe I should consider the web space business?

My advice to Communitech/Interland (our provider) is to add some of the market's cheap hard drives and hand their customers some more space.
If they don't we'll probably move the site to somewhere else where disk space is virtually unlimited. Like my server park server, which runs a bunch of sites already for about the price of what we pay for one - GFF - with Communitech.

Disk space is the silliest limit to set up for a web site. Traffic, bandwidth or CPU load would make more sense (if any) - but not disk space.

Sigh!