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How do webmails afford webspace?

C

Cristatus

Diamond Member
I understand that they have sponsors and stuff like that, where they get the money from the pay for each user, but how does a web alot the space for each user?

Does each person have their own partition on a hard drive? How much do these hard drives cost, and how big are they?

And with the new webmail wars about volume available per user (2 gigs from GMail, 1 gig from Yahoo! India, 250 MB from other Yahoo! Accounts, and 250 MB from Hotmail) it's a wonder where the people get their space from. Each of these providers must be having at least a million users.

So, where do they get their space from? And where do they store it, and how?

edit: wasn't sure which forum it should go in, so I put in here.
 
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo don't buy webspace. They ARE webspace. They have lots of big, fast, redundant hard drives in thier own datacenters hooked to the internet via OC-48 lines, and they can allocate space on those disks however they want.
 
Lots and lots of hard drives?

They pay for it by displaying ads in the webmail interface. That's also why most make you pay extra to have POP access (where you could view your email sans advertising).
 
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
 
If anybody has the resources to allocate space it's companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. But do you honestly think most users even come close to using GBs of space? They know most users won't use but a tiny fraction of that and for the small percentage of users who actually do use a ton of space they have more than adequate resources to handle it.

Yahoo announced they'll be bumping theirs up to 1GB in the coming weeks (which prompted Google to play a rather cheesy one-up card and bump theirs to 2GB) but it won't matter to me. I'm still using only about 5% of the 250MB I already have available on Yahoo and less than 1% of my Gmail space and don't see that changing anytime soon.
 
Uh, are you seriously asking this question?

They have their own datacenters, mass storage and hosting.
 
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

You can buy a 200GB hard drive for $100. Google can probably buy them in bulk for $75 or less. If google buys 10,000 hard drives, they have the required amount of space. How much does that cost Google? About $750,000. They can afford it.

I'm not saying they actually have this much space allocated to GMail, just that they could do it.
 
Originally posted by: SampSon
Uh, are you seriously asking this question?

They have their own datacenters, mass storage and hosting.
Click to expand...

You mean they don't use RippleHost web hosting account?

Oh nooooooooooooooooes! 😛
 
Originally posted by: notfred
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

You can buy a 200GB hard drive for $100. Google can probably buy them in bulk for $75 or less. If google buys 10,000 hard drives, they have the required amount of space. How much does that cost Google? About $750,000. They can afford it.

I'm not saying they actually have this much space allocated to GMail, just that they could do it.
Click to expand...

I don't doubt they have the resources to it either, but don't forget that you need backups of the drives as well and if they are doing it in raid 5 they need at least 3 times as many drives. That's an awful lot of drives to manage 😛
 
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

Actually, Google has a nearly CONSTANT supply of servers going into their datacenters, and they all come loaded too the max with commodity 250gb drives. If they deleted the rest of their services and just became GMail, they could probably do it physically. But not with the rest of their space-intensive stuff.
 
Originally posted by: EyeMWing
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

Actually, Google has a nearly CONSTANT supply of servers going into their datacenters, and they all come loaded too the max with commodity 250gb drives. If they deleted the rest of their services and just became GMail, they could probably do it physically. But not with the rest of their space-intensive stuff.
Click to expand...

I guess I wasn't clear when I meant that I don't think they have that much physically allocated to Gmail 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Stefan
Originally posted by: EyeMWing
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

Actually, Google has a nearly CONSTANT supply of servers going into their datacenters, and they all come loaded too the max with commodity 250gb drives. If they deleted the rest of their services and just became GMail, they could probably do it physically. But not with the rest of their space-intensive stuff.
Click to expand...

I guess I wasn't clear when I meant that I don't think they have that much physically allocated to Gmail 🙂
Click to expand...

they could probably do it with a really big expensive set of tape libs. Emails are generally small and older emails are accessed much less than newer ones.
 
Originally posted by: yoda291
Originally posted by: Stefan
Originally posted by: EyeMWing
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

Actually, Google has a nearly CONSTANT supply of servers going into their datacenters, and they all come loaded too the max with commodity 250gb drives. If they deleted the rest of their services and just became GMail, they could probably do it physically. But not with the rest of their space-intensive stuff.
Click to expand...

I guess I wasn't clear when I meant that I don't think they have that much physically allocated to Gmail 🙂
Click to expand...

they could probably do it with a really big expensive set of tape libs. Emails are generally small and older emails are accessed much less than newer ones.
Click to expand...

You know what... They've got a billions of yottabyte's of free space and they are all raid 5'ed and all centrally located on the GoogleDeathStar. 🙂 (they've also got 5 off-site backups in case of failure.)
 
Originally posted by: Stefan
Originally posted by: yoda291
Originally posted by: Stefan
Originally posted by: EyeMWing
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

Actually, Google has a nearly CONSTANT supply of servers going into their datacenters, and they all come loaded too the max with commodity 250gb drives. If they deleted the rest of their services and just became GMail, they could probably do it physically. But not with the rest of their space-intensive stuff.
Click to expand...

I guess I wasn't clear when I meant that I don't think they have that much physically allocated to Gmail 🙂
Click to expand...

they could probably do it with a really big expensive set of tape libs. Emails are generally small and older emails are accessed much less than newer ones.
Click to expand...

You know what... They've got a billions of yottabyte's of free space and they are all raid 5'ed and all centrally located on the GoogleDeathStar. 🙂 (they've also got 5 off-site backups in case of failure.)
Click to expand...

actually, thinking about what rossman said, they could probably just buy like a bagillion shared hosting plans, point gmail to a load director and redirect everyone somewhere too.

This does poes the question tho: is rossman just another google labs creation?
 
Originally posted by: yoda291
Originally posted by: Stefan
Originally posted by: yoda291
Originally posted by: Stefan
Originally posted by: EyeMWing
Originally posted by: Stefan
Each user's account doesn't physically take up 2GB, 1GB or 250MB of space. Each acount only takes up the amount of space that their messages take up.

If 1 million users only have 1MB of emails on their account, the provider is only using 1 million MB of their space. I don't think that any of these providers have the space necessary to allocate the full amount of space to every user.

Where are you going to put 1 million 2GB accounts on google? Do you think they have 2000 petabytes of physical diskspace? I doubt it.
Click to expand...

Actually, Google has a nearly CONSTANT supply of servers going into their datacenters, and they all come loaded too the max with commodity 250gb drives. If they deleted the rest of their services and just became GMail, they could probably do it physically. But not with the rest of their space-intensive stuff.
Click to expand...

I guess I wasn't clear when I meant that I don't think they have that much physically allocated to Gmail 🙂
Click to expand...

they could probably do it with a really big expensive set of tape libs. Emails are generally small and older emails are accessed much less than newer ones.
Click to expand...

You know what... They've got a billions of yottabyte's of free space and they are all raid 5'ed and all centrally located on the GoogleDeathStar. 🙂 (they've also got 5 off-site backups in case of failure.)
Click to expand...

actually, thinking about what rossman said, they could probably just buy like a bagillion shared hosting plans, point gmail to a load director and redirect everyone somewhere too.

This does poes the question tho: is rossman just another google labs creation?
Click to expand...

Why would they buy from another hosting plan, wouldn't it be easier to just set it up themselves and manage it themselves?

And the question about rossman: hmm...
 
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