Happy New Year! A new year always brings new things - which is true even more so in the Internet services industry. I've been thinking about new things that will influence the web hosting industry this year. One thing that particularly struck me is hard drive size.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Seagate Technology made product announcements about their upcoming 1 terabyte hard drives. Hitachi will start selling its new drive in the first quarter while Seagate promises to do the same within the first half of 2007.
Yes, that's right - one terabyte of space on a 3.5" hard drive with either a SATA or IDE interface. Hitachi plans on initially selling the drive for $399 - or $0.40/GB. The previous record was 750GB, introduced in spring of 2006. Building the home theater PC will now be even more powerful by being able to build a few terabytes of storage.
As for the effect on hosting companies, this will further drive customer demand for more storage for websites. And some hosting companies will undoubtedly raise the amount of disk space included with hosting plans as the year progresses. 1and1 offers 200GB of disk space for $9.99 already; what will they go to next once the one terabyte drives come down in price? Seriously, how many websites really need 200GB of disk space?
At groupSPARK Private Label Exchange Hosting, our partners, most of whom are ISP's and Web Hosting companies, are relaying their customers' demands for ever-increasing mailbox sizes to us. After all, who's got the time to delete email from Outlook? It's because of this trend that we now allow up to a 10GB Exchange Server mailbox size. As the year progresses, we will most likely also increase this limit.
Of course, offering larger and larger disk quotas as a service provider brings along its own headaches, namely backing up such large amounts of data and continually increasing the amount of disk space given to customers. Will it ever end? Probably not as long as hard drive manufacturers keep building larger drives!
As someone who works in hosting, I'm constantly amazed how quickly the storage needs of our customers continue to grow. We try to stay ahead of the curve and constantly evaluate our storage allocations with others in the industry. However, we try and stay out of the pure storage race as we want to provide the best web hosting, not the best web storage.
My hope is that most websites realize that a good host isn't necessarily that one that offers the most storage.