This rant’s origin started when I got a request to bump up a limit on a MU account by Brian. We currently have our limit pathetically low. The reasons…
We are currently hosting this site on UBC IT Services VM service which I am generally quite happy with especially the level of support from their excellent sysadmins but the thing I am not happy about is the very, very OLD School spartan non-existent disk space allocation they give us to run this service. Basically with out current plan we get 48G on a SAN compare that to my Dreamhost account that gives me a 397.9 GB which increases every month and I only pay $9/month!!! We can move up our allocated space at anytime with IT Services but that requires a reboot.
So how do these web hosting co’s do it? They use cloud storage techniques which allows accounts not to be tied to a physical limit (well there is but not your account will not choke if you go over) where as our account is a mount on a SAN which will choke if we start to approach or want to go over without them intervening and “cutting a larger piece” of the SAN. If using method’s like that of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud you can scale out they just add more disk as resources are consumed on the cloud you pay by what you use.
Call me crazy but isn’t the way to go? Imagine how kick ass this would be on a Campus? Units could get accounts and only get charged for what the use no unnecessary waste. The money saved and spent on maintaining disk/computing could be used on other IT expenses. Disk and CPU should be like heat and water…
Someday I guess baby steps for now.
