cheap disk space?

[Binky]

I signed up for a trial at FotoTime (http://www.fototime.com). For $24 a year I can store 250MB worth of photos. It's a terrific service, IMO, but I would really rather host my photos on my own site where I'd have complete control over layout and things. At $10/month per 50MB block the same space on FQ would cost $600 a year. 25 times more!!!

I'm not complaining about FQ rates. I host a number of sites here and it's been worth every penny. I've never even considered moving to a cheaper host. But how to explain the difference for just disk space?

Elsewhere in these forums I've read that some other hosts offer massive storage on the premise that few will actually use it and that space is shared. But I don't think that this applies to FotoTime because I've read newsgroup postings on the subject and many wind up not only using the 250Mb but buy more at the same rate.

I look forward to the simple explanation that will make me look like a dope.

[Deb]

There is a huge difference between the storage of static files (images) and files of a more dynamic nature (cgi, php, etc). As a full service hosting provider the offer of disk space is for disk space that can be used for virtually anything whether it be static or dynamic and the affects of this are dramatically different.

If our servers were built with large lower cost drives specifically for the storage and delivery of images we would in fact be able to put a lot more on the servers. However, the FutureQuest Servers have many more tasks to complete outside of static file delivery and the expectations for the delivery of these files is far greater than that of a static file server. For this reason the expense of doing so increases dramatically. Add in, backup of the files, statistics for the files, and a wider range of processing to deliver a variety of different types of files via a number of different methods and it becomes easier to see just how different the servers and services are from one another.

If you do have a large amount of static files, such as your images, then it is usually more cost effective to utilize the services of places such as FotoTime that concentrate on that specific service offering. On the other hand, if you have files that you need to dynamically manipulate for your web site, or if you find the outsourced service to be affecting the speed of your web site, then paying the extra for a service that can offer that ability is the way to go.

Again, it just depends on the requirements of the site and the human(s) behind it.

Deb
- There's just always more to it...

[Jeff]

FotoTime also makes money off selling prints and merchandise from your images I believe, and that might be a great thing too to have it all integrated. If it fits your needs exactly, then it might be a very good deal for you to have 'the software' already implemented and ample room to upload your photos to their server. On the other hand, as you pointed out, if you want to change the software to be more flexible or display with your own site's templates or link to another print provider, etc. you'll find yourself out of luck at FotoTime. Also is there any chance they will fold, or merge with someone else, or change the software, formatting, or merchandise marketing not to your liking in the future leaving all your images stuck on someone else's server without an upgrade path? And I notice on their demo that if I click the "full size image" for one of the thumbs it says "photo not found" and when I first clicked to visit there it took a long time to come up, and then it came up to normal speed. There's probably nothing at all wrong with that for personal photos, but then again, most expect a higher standard for their web sites from FutureQuest including less than 60 minute technical support and a lightning-fast network with great quality bandwidth. If you wanted lots of disk space and bandwidth you could have 60 GB of space for $99/month with an entry level dedicated server, or split that with a couple people, but then you would be giving up the support, daily backup, server config, etc. that make the servers and service so great at FutureQuest. I like that FutureQuest is very honest and doesn't try to be all things to all people, but instead does what they do very well and then is honest about what they can't offer. I'm just starting to learn that - never take a job if you can't do it both well and profitably. It's hard to say no, but sometimes you have to in order to do good work and not waste your life doing almost-great or almost-profitable jobs and getting nowhere.

[Binky]

I understand what you're both saying. Really what I'm trying to get a handle on is the ever dwindling cost of storage and how it relates to various types of hosting out there. I just bought a 40 gigabyte HD for around a hundred bucks. What this means in the real world I don't know.

[Deb]

Yeah, we've got a lot of disk space on our home systems too.... The drives in the servers however cost over $700 each when we purchased them and we do require at least two drives per server. $1,400 multiplied by .... well you get the idea ;)

IDE is quite a bit cheaper than SCSI and my home system's requirements are not near as high as that of the FutureQuest's Servers which are pounded on 24/7/365 by hundreds of clients doing a variety of things. At the same time, drives that I wouldn't trust in my child's computer are often found within the servers of many hosts because they are cheap of course.

Deb
- Could you imagine public transport handled by VW Bugs?

[Evoir]

Originally posted by Deb:

- Could you imagine public transport handled by VW Bugs?

I couldn't help myself. YES (http://www.citycarshare.org/introduction/whatvehicles.sht)

(this post has very little to do with the topic at hand.)

[Jeff]

Really what I'm trying to get a handle on is the ever dwindling cost of storage and how it relates to various types of hosting out there. I just bought a 40 gigabyte HD for around a hundred bucks. What this means in the real world I don't know.
Whenever I expand one thing, I usually find all of a sudden everything else needs a boost then too. FutureQuest just chooses to price based on disk space and bandwidth because those are two things which are tangible and can be accurately measured without a huge overhead.

For a home example, I put out a small 'magazine' each month now. "Back in the day" it was run on a old press so we couldn't have pictures, and the file size was very small. Then color laser printers and the cost per print finally came down to a level we could afford so we bought a color laser printer and were overjoyed to be able to run 1 or 2 pages of color each month, and lots of pictures. With that, I found my old digital camera which generated pictures in the KB wasn't sharp enough (because the low res showed on the laser unlike on my older inkjets) so I then had to get a new digital camera. The new file size from the digitial camera is ~ 2.5 MB per picture jpeg, or 7-12 MB raw/tiff, per picture. And now I find I need to upgrade the memory in my computer from 512 to 1 GB to handle the photos (already spent $200 on incompatible RIMM's... now may need 4 new rimms because the like kind have been discontinued...) Then also the file size of the Corel file it's done in went up from a few MB each month to 25 MB and now to 170+ MB for each issue. I typically save several revisions, so I end up with around 1 GB per month. Looking at the computer next to me I used to have a single 9 GB disk, and I could back it up using drive copy to clone the drive each month. Now that I have 36 GB and growing and an 80 GB IDE drive, it's not so much that the drives to clone to would be expensive, but the time it would take would be very long as the speed hasn't increased much at all (less than 2x) while my file sizes have increased by 10x to 150x. Now my backups are done on CDR. When I first got a CDR drive I could fit everything onto one disk which cost a few dollars. Now that they're much cheaper ($.50 per CDR and a hundred or so for a burner vs. $700 which I paid when they first came out), I find I have a drawer full of CDR's (hundreds) of data files and backups. So the time it takes now to backup or find a file from a specific backup has incrased dramatically. And these upgrades because color laser printers became fairly inexpensive ;)

[Binky]

My first computer was a Northstar Advantage a friend of mine literally found in the garbage, around '88 or '89. It was about 8 years old and I believe originally sold for something like 6 or 7 thousand dollars. 2 floppy drives, no hard drive, and 64K RAM. I couldn't believe my good luck. "This is all I will ever need!" I thought.

http://boppin.com/images/nsa.jpg

I'm now on my 5th computer.

[hobbes]

As long as we're reminiscing ...

My first computer was a Commodore PET Series 2001 (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=191). The trapezoid monitor was attached to the CPU, it had a chiclet keyboard, cassette tape for storage, and a whoping 8KB of memory!

[Brian]

Originally posted by Binky:
My first computer was a Northstar Advantage a friend of mine literally found in the garbage, around '88 or '89. It was about 8 years old and I believe originally sold for something like 6 or 7 thousand dollars. 2 floppy drives, no hard drive, and 64K RAM. I couldn't believe my good luck. "This is all I will ever need!" I thought.

I'm now on my 5th computer.

Sounds like my first system too! I went from that to a 90mhz processor 3GB HD. Then upgraded that to 120mhz, and more ram.. Kind of funny if you think back to how cool it was to upgrade by 30mhz lol.

-Brian

[EdSpidre]

Note: Slightly offtopic.

Brian,

When did you get that 3gb drive with your p90? The largest drive I could order back when I bought my p90 in 94-95 was 1gb drive which was approximately $150 more than the 730mb. I think a year later, they were just pushing 2.1gb.

- Ed

[Terra]

Can I state that I once had a love affair with my Conner 210MB IDE drive?

--
Terra
--it was like two peas in a pod--
FutureQuest

[EdSpidre]

I think we all did. I fell in love with my IBM PS/2 until she wouldn't "open up" to me more. She wasn't so flexible, and just plain picky. Oh and she wasn't a cheap date either. Always wanting Microchannel accessories.

Are there any new technologies we fall in love with or has it all lost it's feel?

[Terra]

Are there any new technologies we fall in love with
Hmmm, I've always heard that Unlimited Bandwidth and Unlimited Disk Space is a highly sought after date... :P

Then you wake up in the morning with a hangover and wonder who in the heck this person laying next to you is! :hair:

--
Terra
--run, Forest, runnnnnn!--
FutureQuest

[Brian]

Originally posted by EdSpidre:
Note: Slightly offtopic.

Brian,

When did you get that 3gb drive with your p90? The largest drive I could order back when I bought my p90 in 94-95 was 1gb drive which was approximately $150 more than the 730mb. I think a year later, they were just pushing 2.1gb.

- Ed

Actually now that I think about it, that computer propably only did come with a 1GB drive, and I later upgraded it to a 3GB one lol. That computer got upgraded a few times in its day so its all a blur lol.

-Brian

[PaulKroll]

First computer I worked on: TDL Xitan. (Blue box, s-100 bus, Z-80)

First computer I owned: TRS-80 Model I, level I basic, 4K RAM, 4K ROM.

Then came the Atari 800 (still the most solid machine I've ever owned), the C-64 (still the least solid machine I've ever owned...went thru three of them), C-128, Amiga 1000, 500, 2000, 3000, then the custom PCs (gave up on Amiga when A) they made Yet Another Suicidal Move, and B) Doom came out).

I've had maybe 4 - 6 distinct PCs, since then.

I still miss games from all three. Some of the most fun I ever had playing on a computer was on the TRS-80, playing Space Warp. Ah, the old days... Altogether though, I can live with the present. :)

[Jeff]

Boy I feel like such a newbie!

I started on an Apple II - I remember the first external 3.5" floppy was a thing of excitement. From there I went on to a 368 with a math coprocessor (wow!) and a whopping 40 MB hard drive - huge I tell you. And then the great leap forward to windows 3.1 on a 486 66 - the big decision being whether we really needed 16 MB of Ram and we settled that 8 MB would be plenty for a long time! Think that had a whopping 340 MB hard drive which was just gigantic, not to mention a hand held scanner which cost $699 because it was color! And I remember the battle back then, whether the straight 50 mhz or the "fake 66 mhz" with a system bus not a processor speed was faster or just marketing.

[kitchin]

First computer I worked on: teletype connection to a mainframe (or miniframe?), with a paper punch tape for storage. You put the phone receiver into the rubber gaskets of a modem. And people were programming it to play games and display porn, even back then. In clackety-clack text!

First computer I owned: 486 notebook called the IBM Thinkpad 500. That's just before the Pentium chip came out.

I must have been a real moocher to wait so long!

[manish]

Hmmm, I've always heard that Unlimited Bandwidth and Unlimited Disk Space is a highly sought after date...
Then you wake up in the morning with a hangover and wonder who in the heck this person laying next to you is!


Are we still talking about computers ? :V

I just gave away my first computer a P133 with 1.2 GB Hard Drive and a whopping 16Mb of RAM. It still is a decent machine compared to the others mentioned here :)

Manish

[Deb]

Terra wasn't the only one with a previous love ya know :P

My 'first love' had a HUGE 10MB hard drive in it! He went by the name IBM XT and provided me hours and hours of enjoyment by allowing me to play Tetris in VGA COLOR!

http://www.aota.net/4F/ibmxt.jpg
:QTlove: :love: }{ :QTlove:

Deb
- Word on a Floppy?? No Way Mom!

[Brian]

I remember the days of typing class when we had TRS-90's and Tandys. Back then there was no such thing as networking to print. I remember we had to push the printer cart, and be VERY carefull when connecting the printer to the computer, because very often that slight bump crashed it and ate your file lol.

-Brian

[TheEgo]

Originally posted by PaulKroll:
First computer I owned: TRS-80 Model I, level I basic, 4K RAM, 4K ROM. Ah, yes... The days of BASIC programs on cassette tape, thermal printers with shiny silver paper, and pixels the size of my front teeth. mE

Never owned one, but that was the Very First Computer I Ever Laid My Hands On, and it gave me my purpose in life -- such as it is.

The Ego

[Syneryder]

First computer I ever touched was a Kaypro running CP/M, though it was only on loan from the University. I was 3 or 4 at the time.

My parents got an Apple IIe when I was 4 or 5, dual 5 1/4" floppy, 64KB RAM, a few games like Buck Rogers and ET Comes Back - I loved it because it had speech synthesis, but it was a pathetic text/graphic adventure with spelling errors. The solution was "Use Umbralla" for anyone who wants to know.

Saved my pocket money for 4 years and bought a Commodore 64, my own first computer. Didn't get a tape drive for ages, and a 5 1/4" came much later. Bought Zzap!64 (http://www.zzap64.co.uk/) and Commodore Force magazines (with the freebie games cover-cassettes) every month for nearly 4 years until they stopped publishing. I also had paddles for the thing - anyone remember the game LeMans? My folks bought an Apple IIGS around then too.

I didn't start on the PC until Dec 1994 with a 486DX2/66, 4MB RAM, 340MB hard drive and 1MB video card. Doom was an incentive, it worked great with my Gravis Ultrasound w/256KB sample RAM. Today I also run a Celeron 400 / 384MB RAM / 10GB HDD / SB Live Platinum 5.1 (networked to the 486), and a Palm m100.

We still have every one of those computers.

[Harley]

My very own first computer was a Mac Plus I got at the start of first year university. One of my proffesors, who was really into MIDI and had an Atari ST, remarked,"Oh, you got one of those bourgoise computers!"
:D