Why is there a limit on personal storage?

I know there's a whole technical discussion going on about the Backup Feature, but I just realized that you're only supposed to use up 50GB for personal storage. Why?

I've been a customer for 3 years and I've got 350GB. What am I going to do with all that space? I'm not even close to 50GB, but still ... it kind of irks me that I can't go beyond that limit.

What a marketing ploy to give customers more storage each week for their loyalty.

Seriously, who's building a website with 350GB of stuff in a shared hosting environment, anyway?

I guess if my photo collection ever exceeds 50GB, all I have to do is back them up in a blog ... right?

Well, DreamHost service is priced as a shared web hosting service, not as an infinite storage backup service.

Most websites will not need the hundreds of gigs of disk that is offered in the plan, and most of the sites that do would require other resources that are not offered in infinite supply by your plan - specifically CPU and memory.

Then again, there are those very few sites that have massive amounts of media and are low-traffic. I'm not sure there's even one that uses all the advertised disk space.

At any rate, if you did want to share your entire photo collection online and chose to offer downloads or display of full-resolution versions of these photos (and if you don't shoot in raw mode or if you offer raw mode downloads), then you could do what you say - though I think it would be disingenuous to upload media to a site where there was no possibility that you'd link to even a fraction of the content.

The new online backup service is priced to be a decent value and comparable to many online backup services out there. Would it be reasonable for them to price it so they'd lose money and eventually go out of business? I hope not because then we'd be up a creek because we'd have killed the goose the laid the golden eggs.

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They are a web hosting company, true, but where do they talk about the delineation between personal file and web storage on their features page:

http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-features.html#disk_storage

I don't know, maybe I missed the fine print 3 years ago, maybe it's a new policy, but when you're "pimping" huge amounts of storage like they do with features like WebDav, what do you think people are going to do?

How long have they had this policy?

For me, I usually just hit renew once a year for my annual Dreamhost plan. I'm not even close to the personal storage limit, but with the ever-expanding storage I always thought it would take something really special to make me switch to something else. This just of puts a lot of other options back on the table.

We can't assume that all the people will use the storage like us. I think that is why DH needs a policy.

They're a web host - not a backup service. There are backup services out there that won't let you run a web site from their hard drive space, even though you're paying for it.

You can't go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and dump all of the food trays into the trash can. If they'll let you have as much as you want, as long as you eat it while you're there, why shouldn't you just be able to do whatever you want with it?

All hosts are going to have content restrictions of some sort, but not all hosts give you backup space like Dreamhost where those restrictions are lifted (except for illegal content, of course). This is something they could have easily sold separately or charged for as an add-on.

In reply to:
Seriously, who's building a website with 350GB of stuff in a shared hosting environment, anyway?

Anyone that requires more storage than CPU usage. If your site is harder on space or bandwidth than it is on the CPU, shared is often fine. If it's a CPU hog, then you pretty much get forced onto your own server at some point.

I like the buffet analogy...its not just about the total resources offered, but how they're used up because that sets a sort of limit of its own.

Anyway, maybe I read the newsletter wrong, but isn't this basically a new feature we didn't have before - for free?

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In reply to:
Anyway, maybe I read the newsletter wrong, but isn't this basically a new feature we didn't have before - for free?

Pretty much, but anyone that was already using space for it anyway might not see it as such. For them, it would be like raising the speed limit from 55 to 65 on a street that they were already doing 65 on anyway. wink

It's definitely a good thing, though. The average user could probably use reasonable amounts for backups anyway and never hear a peep from DH, whereas someone trying to back up 100 DVDs might.

Those rules just need to be in place for the few that ruin it for the majority. Even the most obvious rules like "no kiddie porn" only need to exist for the few idiots that would host it in the first place.

50GB is extremely generous, in my opinion.

Besides, based on my calculations, it's so slow that it would take 75 days to fill up 50GB :)

Why is there a limit on personal storage?