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December 09, 2006
Fear My Gaping Maw
When I wasn't looking my host provider bumped up the amount of disk space and bandwidth I have. I now have 250GB of space on my host server, and 2.5 terabytes of bandwidth per month. To give you a sense of what kind of overkill this is, my entire site is less than 500MB of disk space, and if my bandwidth continues as is, I'll eat through about 27GB in bandwidth by the end of the month. Which means that I have space in my account for 500 Web sites like this one, and I would need to have 93 times the traffic I currently have before I would max out my monthly allotment. Not bad for $20 a month.
Now, I suspect the reason my host provider can offer such outlandishly generous disk space and bandwidth is because the vast majority of sites almost certainly come nowhere close to using 250GB of disk space and/or requiring 2.5TB of bandwidth. While I don't doubt my host provider would honor its commitment to me if I suddenly started sucking down all 2.5TB of my bandwidth, I do sort of idly wonder what would happen if all their developer-level accounts suddenly needed that wide a pipe. I can't help but imagine things would get crowded. It's idle speculation, but then, so much speculation is.
At least now I understand why, when I knew I was going to be Farked because of Bacon Cat, and I called my host provider to warn them of the oncoming traffic spike, their response was, more or less, "yeah, okay, whatever." Even a mighty Farking is not likely to cause them or my account much trouble. That's oddly reassuring. And now I'm going to entirely stop worrying about ever running out of server space. At the rate I accrete files on the site I'd have to keep up what I'm doing here for a couple thousand years before filled up my server. I find that comforting.
Posted by john at December 9, 2006 03:28 AM
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Comments
Aaron Haynes | December 9, 2006 08:57 AM
Any thoughts of what you might want to do with the extra space? Maybe some silly videos in addition to the occasional silly pictures!
BACON CAT: THE MOTION PICTURE.
A suggestion | December 9, 2006 09:25 AM
Blogs for everyone!
A ScalziSpot blog would have higher cache than a BlogSpot blog, for sure!
fastfinge | December 9, 2006 11:00 AM
Did you read the small print? If you were sucking down that amount all the time, I'm almost sure they'd find a way to cut you off. They'd honor it for a few months, sure, but...
Annalee Flower Horne | December 9, 2006 12:11 PM
I do sort of idly wonder what would happen if all their developer-level accounts suddenly needed that wide a pipe.
Hey, banks have been running on the theory that not everyone needs their money at once for a pretty long time. If everyone needed all their internets at once, I imagine we'd get a big internet crash. Which is probably better than a big banking crash, but it would still suck.
I just woke up... that was eloquent in my head.
Rachel | December 9, 2006 01:30 PM
Your new books don't appear to be available in Iowa City. In fact, Prairie Lights doesn't carry any of them. They seemed not-hostile to SF when Kelly Link came through a couple months ago. Perhaps I misread.
Yuck.
Diatryma | December 9, 2006 02:41 PM
I thought Prairie Lights did have them-- I could have sworn I saw Ghost Brigades upstairs by the rest of the science fiction. But I manufacture memories a fair amount, so who knows.
Rachel | December 9, 2006 03:09 PM
No, I called, and I've looked a few times (more or less every time I've been there).
Maybe they got stock in and sold it out in between times I've gone.
Steve Buchheit | December 9, 2006 03:24 PM
More bacon taped to household pets, I say. That'll suck the bandwidth down.
Tomben | December 9, 2006 05:57 PM
I think you'll find the 'breaking' point on your hosting account to be the CPU usage. Many hosting providers offer large amounts of disk space and bandwidth, but limit you are taxing the web servers processors too much. Once you hit that point, they usually try to up sell you to a dedicated server. I think Warren Ellis has a post about this happening to him recently.
Dave | December 9, 2006 08:12 PM
Dude, the reason they are effectively no longer throttling your disk or bandwidth is that those commodities have now become effectively too cheap to meter. They'll care if you start hogging CPU or if you start serving up video by the bucket-load, but otherwise it's simply not worth the effort necessary to charge people by the byte anymore. Good times.
John Scalzi | December 9, 2006 08:58 PM
Dave:
"Dude, the reason they are effectively no longer throttling your disk or bandwidth is that those commodities have now become effectively too cheap to meter."
Oh, I agree. I do wonder why other host providers haven't quite caught up with that fact, however.
htom | December 11, 2006 09:00 PM
Totally off topic, but I remember you were contemplating buying a new computer (back in October?); the ArsTechnica computer buying guide, December 2006, is up.
http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/system-guide-200612.ars
John Scalzi | December 11, 2006 09:14 PM
Yup. My setup is a bit like their "God Box" with some variances, notably the monitor (which is better) and the video card (which is slightly worse, but I have two of them in SLI configuration, so it's back to being better).
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Chang, who gets nothing done without BRAINZ | December 9, 2006 08:03 AM
SOn, what are you ddoing up at 3:30AM on a Friday night? I know you don't drink, so it has to be a couple of other things.
Dang...