The unlimited disk space web hosting scam is still alive and running

There are still a lot of webhosting providers out there offering unlimited disk space… But disk space is very costly and there is an underlying media that stores it. It simple to understand that the disk space costs are proprotional to its amount:

The more disk space you use, the higher your costs are.

Logic 101

It is everyone’s dream to believe that a limited resources can (magically) become unlimited.

A successful CDN company launched such offer last month (no name will be given in this article but it is some kind of CDN with a whale). The offer was too good to be true: unlimited disk space for less than $9 per month! After signing up the fairy tale ended: it was a dedicated server with a 4TB disk. In fairness to this provider: a full refund was given when the cancelation was requested.

Now let’s examine data costs: the amount of data is not the only cost factor.

Another important factor is the ability (or not) to access this data (or move it).

Inventory basics

Data is like a heavy digital stone: the bigger it is, the least you want to move it. Amazon AWS (and other cloud companies) understood this a long time ago and created two types of data: hot data and cold data. Hot data is the data you access very frequently: like the data sitting in the disk of your own computer.

Cold data is the data that you really do not need every day.

Data fridge

It is a very well named concept: because there are different degrees of coldness. There is a difference between the data you would access once a year versus the data that you might never access again. The colder your data is, the cheaper it will be!