Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth 205

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the until-your-traffic-spikes dept.
Lucas123 writes "Yahoo this week opened up a new monthly Web Hosting service for small and medium sized businesses that allows unlimited hosted storage capacity and bandwidth for $11.95 a month. Yahoo had been charging $12 a month for 5GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth; $20 a month for 10GB disk space and 400GB of bandwidth; and $40 for 20GB disk space and 500GB bandwidth.."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth More

Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth

Comments Filter:

  • Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FredFredrickson ( 1177871 ) * on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:21PM (#22353404) Homepage Journal
    Interesting to see a big company like Yahoo try their hand at the "unlimited" marketing game. Anybody who's had experience in the past with any company who offers "unlimited" knows better- Anybody remember Comcast "unlimited" broadband?

    Bunches of online hosting companies offer "unlimited" services with as much space or bandwidth as you need- and all these companies have a disclaimer in their TOS that explains they can't use more than .0001% of their resources. Turns out you can have 500 gb of files, but coincidentally it takes just enough cpu to copy the file that they kick you off. Or some hosting companies go ahead and say it in the TOS- you can't have more than 1% of the alotted bandwidth, other than that it's unlimited!

    Eventually, yes, they get brought down. Law suits, investigations, what have you. They will eventually add their limits to the fine print, just like everybody before them. The catch? Everybody with the host will suffer horrible service up till the day the limit is defined, and after that, it probably won't get much better. That is, if you're not already kicked off their service for using too much of the unlimited service. Anybody not completely disgusted with the service at this point will most likely be offended that their freedom is being taken away and may leave out of protest alone.

    You'd think Yahoo would learn better than start a huge marketing campaign on a service they can't possibly keep profitable. Think about it- Yahoo Music Unlimited just closed! It was a nice idea, except it wasn't making them money! This is a huge PR disaster waiting to happen.

    Let's just take them up on the offer and get rid of them. Somebody call Google and explain to them there's a new host that will host Google's search engine for $12. We'll see how long Yahoo stays unlimited.

    • "Unlimited" my ass (Score:5, Funny)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:28PM (#22353520)
      Dear Yahoo,

      You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.

    • Now I'm sure, at the very least, they've gone over their logs, looking at the capacity and actual usage, put it all into kick ass pie charts and crunched some numbers. They probably think usage will remain about the same or perhaps increase to an extent.

      Now I'm not saying this isn't a potentially foolish move, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they thought this out, to a degree.

      On a side note, you bring up Comcast and Yahoo! Music... To very different beasts. How can you apply

      • Now I'm sure, at the very least, they've gone over their logs, looking at the capacity and actual usage, put it all into kick ass pie charts and crunched some numbers.
        It was in their marketing power point presentation for this year that they could do this! If it's in power point it has to be true... Like everything on TV or that you read online...

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by FredFredrickson ( 1177871 ) *
        I used comcast to point out that there's no way to handle "unlimited" without it getting bigger and growing faster than you can keep up with- and I brought up Yahoo music, because according to Ian Rogers the number one reason they're cutting the unlimited is because they weren't making money off of it. (the idea was that behind the scenes, YMU actually payed a royalty for each listen, and hoped people wouldn't listen to such an unlimited extent that it would go upside down on them). Now whether or not they
    • The company that came on and said 40 hours a week peek-time. Unlimited off-peak. Then several months later declared "Unlimited".

      And we've never gone back. Dial-up pretty much was forced away from a per hour rate to a flat $20 fee for unlimited. And the whole industry was moved to a $15-$25 price point.

      Wasn't until broadband came around that prices were able to be raised again. ;-)

      It's not always an impossible thing...

      • Re:Anyone remember Netcom? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by morcego ( 260031 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:51PM (#22354624)

        back. Dial-up pretty much was forced away from a per hour rate to a flat $20 fee for unlimited. And the whole industry was moved to a $15-$25 price point.


        This is not a good example, since dial-up usage doesn't scale very much. You only have 24 hours/day, and your bandwidth is no more than 56k.

        So, you see, if your average user stays connected 3 hours/day, the heavy user will only use 8x time amount. Now, if you consider broadband and your average users transfer 2GB/month, a heavy user will easily transfer 400GB/month. Thats 200 times more. And according to a quick calculation here (could be wrong), it is theoretically possible for a user to use 1.3TB/month on a 4Mbps connection (note: actually bandwidth usage, including protocol overhead etc).

        If you consider webhosting, things get even worst. An average user will store 500MB, and transfer 2GB/month (if that). While a heavy user can easily reach 500GB and transfer 2TB/month. In both cases, 1000 times more (or 1024, if you like).

        Unlimited can easily become a real nightmare.
      • I was one of their first customers (and last FWIW). Stayed with their servers till the host I logged into died and earthlink couldn't find it.
        -nB

    • Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nmos ( 25822 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:31PM (#22354344)
      You'd think Yahoo would learn better than start a huge marketing campaign on a service they can't possibly keep profitable. Think about it- Yahoo Music Unlimited just closed! It was a nice idea, except it wasn't making them money! This is a huge PR disaster waiting to happen.

      Maybe the two are connected. It could be that closing their music service is leaving them with some extra bandwidth/storage/servers and they'd rather bring in some revenue then let those resources sit idle.
  • Will this service continue after Yahoo is bought? Is it just something to cause their price to go up before they are bought by claiming more customers?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by qortra ( 591818 )
      My guess is that this is part of Jerry Yang and Co's stand against Microsoft. I bet that they don't want to be bought out, and they need to increase shareholder confidence in them in order to prevent it. If I'm right, it won't stop here. There will be initiatives and announcements about future projects and products over the next few weeks, all in an effort to increase shareholder confidence.

  • Where's CmdrTaco? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:24PM (#22353460)
    Hey Slashdot admins, are you moving over to Yahoo? I bet that'd cut back on your hosting costs by quite a bit. That'd also be a great test of how truly unlimited it is.
    • I'm sure Yahoo would gladly host Slashdot for free, as long as they could fill up the page with advertisements and rename it Yahoo! Slashdot!

      • as long as they could fill up the page with advertisements
        What? And call them Slashvertisements(TM)?

  • The Quota Super-sizing Trend (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 1sockchuck ( 826398 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:26PM (#22353490) Homepage
    Yahoo's move is the inevitable endgame in an ongoing arms race between major shared hosting firms [datacenterknowledge.com], who have been super-sizing the disk space and data transfer on their accounts for two years. Here's the larger question: Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk? Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space [hostgator.com] is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by paitre ( 32242 )
      IMO, it's more than likely marketing.
      Everyone already knows that these resources are oversold, so it really was just a matter of time before someone said "fuck this, all the bandwidth/disk/whatever you can use on a shared server for one low monthly fee".

      The catch is that they =will= shunt people off onto dedicated servers if/when the need arises, and then they'll crucify them costs-wise (and I wouldn't be surprised to find in the small print that they have the right to move your account, at whim, to best se

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by eebra82 ( 907996 )

      Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it.

      I don't think it's so much about attracting customers who need a kazillion gigabytes of space as much as it is attractive to people who just want a service that works without any added costs. I mean, how is a regular guy supposed to know if 50 gigs per month is enough or not? This is flatrate. Use it as you please, just pay the fee and we [Yahoo] will sort the rest.

    • Re:The Quota Super-sizing Trend (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:36PM (#22354410)
      Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk?

      I'll let you judge, let's take one of those supersized shared hosts, which offers up to 750GB of disk space. In the ToS however, I find an interesting clause that says, paraphrasing: "750GB, but no more than 5GB archives, no more than 5GB of media files, no more than 5GB of data files or programs, no more than 5GB for SQL data dumps".

      So, I went to chat with the support, and ask, what the hell I'm going to use then those 750GB for? Names and domains replaced, since, no need to single out either one of them (they're all the same anyway). Here's our conversation:

      ------------

      Support Guy1: Hello

      Support Guy1: Welcome to XXXXXXX Hosting Services!

      ME: Hello, please clarify your ToS: "NO more than 5,000 MB of a Linux shared hosting account can be allocated to Executable files and all other files which are the result of compiling a program. These include but are not limited to .exe, .pdf, .psd files."

      ME: PDF and PSD files are not compiled programs

      Support Guy1: yes they are not but they are considered as applications

      ME: why does XXXXXXX put limitations on the meaning of the bytes I use on my eventual account

      Support Guy1: Could you please hold on a second so that I can transfer you to one of our experienced senior sales assistants for better assistance :)

      ME: ok

      This chat session has been transfered to Support Guy2 [sales]

      Support Guy2: Hello

      ME: hello, can you please explain the rationale behind XXXXXXX putting limitations on the meaning of the bytes I use on my eventual account

      Support Guy2: Well of course - on our shared hosting accounts there are a lot of users and in order to maintain optimal performance we have to limit some of the file types stored on the server.

      ME: can you explain how does it differ performance-wise to store 5MB of an mpeg and 5MB of an SQL file.

      Support Guy2: Well the limits are far wider than 5 MB - they are actually 5 GB - so you can store 5 Gigs MPEGs total :)

      Support Guy2: in regards to the SQL files - you can have as big file as you wish, as long as it does not load the server :)

      ME: I realize, it's an example :) make it X MB of mpeg and X MB of SQL

      ME: if I don't serve those files, would that section of the ToS apply to me

      Support Guy2: Well if you do not use those kind of files, you should disregard this line in the TOS, since it does not apply for you :)

      Support Guy2: May I just ask what do you plan to host?

      ME: can I quote you on this, if I store 6GB of mpegs for example, and not serve them, and I find my account suspended

      Support Guy2: Well I fear we have missed each other in the line... You cannot have more than 5 GB total multimedia files on the shared hosting account. In case you have 6, you should find an alternative solution like a VPS or a dedicated server.

      ME: but you offer 750GB of storage, can you please supply one example what do your customers use 750GB for, if not for media files, archives, executables, dumps and data files

      Support Guy2: Well you can have combinations of files plus other file types that are not limited like txt files.

      ME: I can have 750GB of txt files?

      Support Guy2: We do not apply a direct limitation on the txt files, but still may I ask you what do you plan to host on our servers? Like what kind of website do you plan to have and how large would it be so that I can help you with the most optimal plan :)

      ME: I don't see limitations on the kind of site I can host in the ToS

      ME: except for pornography,

  • All you can eat? (Score:5, Funny)

    by IndustrialComplex ( 975015 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:29PM (#22353528)
    3 months later, an upset Yahoo Exec was overheard saying,

    Tis no man, tis a remorseless eating machine.

  • Unlimited is easy.... when you redefine unlimited. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:33PM (#22353586)
    Not unlimited at all.... they just redefine unlimited.

    http://us.rd.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/Lwebhosting/home/bb/*http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/ [yahoo.com]

    • Re:Unlimited is easy.... when you redefine unlimit (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tompaulco ( 629533 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:55PM (#22353876) Homepage Journal
      I think there is something missing within their service terms, like numbers. Okay, so you might not be able to grow as fast you want, well, before I sign on the dotted line, how fast CAN I grow?What happens to people who exceed this amount? Bounce to a higher rate plan, get charged extra for the extra growth?
      I think Yahoo is just the latest company to cash in on the "hidden a-la-carte" fee structure. Just like cell phone plans, "Free checking" and just about every other "flat rate service", you can no longer tell in advance what you are going to get charged for something, and every time you tear open a bill, you know there is a good chance that it is going to be 50% higher than the month before because of some obscure item buried deep in the fine print.
      • That's exactly right. It's just like the Time Warner-as-ISP issue described in another article earlier this week. Once your usage crosses some unstated threshold, you've violated their Terms of Service and they can drop you like a republican presidential candidate.
    • How about a new law:

      Just like food sold must include a list of incgredients, fat content, etc
      so should certain groups of products have to include a list of guaranted minimum quantities offered, or your money back

      Any advert that references these quantities, in the form of "unlimited", "up to 100 gb" "up to 500% faster" etc.
      would have to disclose the minima too.

      Companies would still be free to promise the sky. But since they would need to at least define a guaranted lower bound, customers would knew a number

  • Unlimited? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WK2 ( 1072560 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:37PM (#22353636) Homepage
    So, is this unlimited, or "Comcast Unlimited (TM)"?

    Yahoo's service has been going downhill for years, and now Microsoft is going to be running things. I can imagine some arbitrary restrictions, or "random" failures, that makes this service not so great. Unlimited bandwidth is nice, but if your pages take 20 seconds to render because the download speed is 128K/s, or if it takes 1 week to upload 100 Gigs, it stops looking so good.

    Don't get me wrong, I haven't tried this service, and it sounds great. I just wouldn't give my hopes up.

  • One size fits all (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rastoboy29 ( 807168 ) * on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:39PM (#22353654) Homepage
    The thing that annoys me about most hosting plans is that they scale up disk space and bandwith together--as if one inevitably follows the other.  For example, I have a miniscule website that hosts a ~200 meg game download.  So I need a whopping ~300 megs of disk space.  But when I get a spike of downloads, I can hit several gigs of bandwith per day.  But I would have to purchase additional "disk space" along with bandwidth if I were going with a traditional hosting plan.

    Annoying.

    • Re:One size fits all (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dekortage ( 697532 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:02PM (#22353956) Homepage

      Well, maybe you shouldn't go with a "traditional" hosting plan. Find a web hosting company like us [arrowbay.net] (or, frankly, many others) who let you add bandwidth to your hosting account on a monthly basis. So in theory, you could have an account with 5gb of disk space and 10 terabytes of bandwidth...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cliveholloway ( 132299 )
      I recommend Nearly Free Speech [nearlyfreespeech.net] - this will suit your needs incredibly well.
    • Trying so hard not to be a fanboy, but...

      Have you considered Amazon S3? I assume your download isn't dynamically generated...

      Some quick calculations: Say you upload one version a month, and you might see 50 downloads on a busy day. That's:

      $0.10 per gig uploaded * 0.2 gigs = 2 cents
      $0.01 per 1k PUT requests means it will cost you a cent after 1k months = 83 years
      $0.15 per gig stored. To make it easy, assume you have five versions archived at any given time: 15 cents per month.
      $0.01 per 10k GET and HEAD requ

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by corvair2k1 ( 658439 )
      I have to also recommend nearlyfreespeech.net, which charges you for the bandwidth and disk you use on a daily basis. Very very reasonable.

  •     I just sent a recommendation to a very large site (daily peak bandwidth > 3Gb/s). I suggested that they drop in a .htaccess to redirect all their heavy content (pictures), and see how long Yahoo lets them play. :)

  • I see an encrypted fuse device in my future......

  • It's a gimmick (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dekortage ( 697532 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @04:47PM (#22353768) Homepage

    Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data. We offer [arrowbay.net] shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth, and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ [yahoo.com]: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls." Or, elsewhere in the help system [yahoo.com]:

    So what does "unlimited" mean, really?

    Disk space:
    You can now create as large a site as you like (you won't face an upper limit, or "ceiling"), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.

    Data transfer:
    In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.

    You can also upload as much as content as you like each month, subject only to the rules that control how fast your site can grow (see above).

    OK. What exactly is that speed of growth?

    (**Yes, I realize that some Arrow Bay customers are reading this. Check your disk and bandwidth usage: if it's always significantly under what you're paying for, consider downgrading to the next package for your next billing cycle. Seriously.)

    • Thanks for finding the "gotchas".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by p0tat03 ( 985078 )

      While I agree that overselling is a valid business strategy that gets too much bad press, hosts can't have their cake and eat it too. The logic behind overselling is that the vast majority of your customers are using so few resources that you can support the few customers that take up a lot of space and bandwith.

      The problem with many hosts is that they are unwilling to honour that concept, either by inserting misleading and insidious exeptions into their TOS'es, or just plain being dicks. When someone get

    • What they're doing is really no different than a lot of hosting companies. It's true, you can use as much bandwidth and disk space as you like. The problem is really server processing power. You couldn't host Slashdot there. You most likely couldn't host anything popular. I'm willing to bet that just about any site hosted by Yahoo! will become unresponsive when it starts getting more than 4,000 hits an hour. Yes, this is great for small businesses who essentially have an online ad for a website that only ge
    • Dekortage thanks for quoting this. I was about to myself.

      Yahoo PR emailed me the "unlimited" press release. I immediately set about finding the unlimited terms, which are not noted in the lengthy terms of service, and which required several clicks to find.

      While I appreciate Yahoo wanting people to not game a truly unlimited service, there's a difference between defining proper usage and defining abuse. In this case, they are offering no reasonable and dependable guidelines for a business to host itself with

    • Re:It's a gimmick (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mxs ( 42717 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @08:49PM (#22356356)
      Hi,

      Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data.
      Thanks for stating the obvious.

      We
      (spamlink)

      offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth,
      That sounds impressive.

      How about $8 for 500gb of disk and 5tb of bandwidth ? Or even 8tb of bandwidth or 700gb, if you get the right promocode ? Dream host..ing ? (this is what a professional calls "surreptitious advertising", just in case you wanted a contrast to your spamlink). There are some people competing in a lunar-cyclish page way, and HOSTs drinking GATORade are out there as well.

      and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**.
      Wow, that sounds reasonable, especially your recommendation to downgrade after the stars. Heartfelt, even.
      Say, why don't you automatically downgrade those people if they are below usage, and automatically upgrade them to the next-higher tier when they exceed their limits ? Now that would be service. I'm sure some companies offer it.

      Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls."
      Yupp, and I especially like that kind of language. You neglect to mention, of course, that Arrow Bay's (limited) service actually contains teh same kind of language :

      You shall at all times use the Services as a conventional and/or traditional web site. You shall not use the Service in any way, in Arrow Bay's sole discretion, that shall impair the functioning or operation of Arrow Bay's Services or equipment. Specifically by way of example and not as a limitation, You shall not use the Services as (i) a repository or instrument for placing or storing archived files, and/or (ii) placing or storing material that can be downloaded through other web sites.
      So if somebody actually were to use the storage provided in full as a webdav-drive, or as historic storage, or actually as an archive of any kind, you can just terminate them and move on. The terms "traditional" and "conventional" are not defined. Is a site hosting 200gigs of home videos "traditional" ? Is it "conventional" ? How about a site that makes available collections of data ?
      Certain dreamy hosts have changed their "interpretation" of their ToS in that way recently, as well. If anybody ever sells you any hosting service with > 20 gb of disk space, you can be all but certain that they really only mean "in theory", never "in practice".

      Oh, do you know where I found that package ? Not near the limits. Not at all near the limits. You first go to the legal terms of service, then search another link way down on the page, then scroll way down (it's the second to last paragraph). That seems really open and honest. Really.
  • Let's see how long this will last if people start Web 2.0 storage sharing sites up there. They probably have deduplication and compression but that won't help if/when people put HD videos up there.
    Those TOS are temporary until MS takes over anyway.

  • Chess egtb (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jshriverWVU ( 810740 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:00PM (#22353930)
    So will they host the entire 3-4-5 and 6 men Chess endgame databases? We in the community have been trying hard over the last year to keep the dataset alive, but few people can house 1.6 Tb at home.

    I try my best with my own modest server, but $12 a month? I'll bite, Yahoo will you host it?

    • If you're serious, I'll host it *but*
      How will I make enough money from it to support the hardware & resources it consumes?
      -nB
  • I, as an owner of a small business, would like to archive everything hosted on the entire internet. So 600 petabytes is included in that "unlimited" figure right?
  • This sounds a lot like Simplenet from the late 90s. They provided you with a sub-domain and unlimited hosting and bandwith for about the same price.

    Then a couple of sites got popular, and started causing problems for the servers.

    That's when Simplenet sent e-mail messages to the "top users" and informed them they would be automatically moved to a new plan as they had qualified for an addendum in the Terms of Service. An addendum that was put out moments before the e-mail message was sent.

    All I remem

  • Dreamhost (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CopaceticOpus ( 965603 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:09PM (#22354054)
    Storage space has been a big issue of contention [dreamhoststatus.com] on Dreamhost as well. I signed up for their service, feeling happy that I had 500G of remote storage to use as I pleased. It turned out it wasn't that simple.

    Unlimited sounds great, until you start using a large amount of space and Yahoo has to find some reason to say that you're not complying with their terms of service.
  • is give companies certantity over their monthly costs while ensuring they can grow without hitting limits and needing to move their sites or pay much higher fees; as well as ensure acess to their sites without hitting monthly limits and paying more or getting cut off. For many smaller businesses that's a good deal - they aren't going to "grow too fast" or violate the TOS by using it as a data backup site or hosting massive files for download. Yahoo gets to attract more businesses to their services, spread

  • Uh-oh, says Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tibor the Hun ( 143056 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:14PM (#22354120)
    I think Microsoft's sphincter just imploded.
    Didn't they just figure out a few months ago how to bump up Hotmail storage up from 2 MB? (And still no IMAP or POP for free?)

  • ...of my "Unix Programmers's Manual" circa 1983 from Bell Laboratories where they say something along the lines of ... "Filenames can be infinite in length (where infinity is set to 255 characters)..."

    Simple solution! Redefine "Unlimited".
  • Unlimited storage? Let's see how well they handle this file:

    # cat /dev/zero >> unlimited.file.my.ass

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by raynet ( 51803 )
      That shouldn't be a problem in any smart filesystem that makes a sha1 or similar checksum of each block and only stores them once. Like filesystem of Plan9 OS and possibly ZFS. Also EXT2 with GZIP extensions would probably work quite well. Maybe even any filesystem with sparse file support, not sure though if they can do a sparse file like that.

  • Why now? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ghjm ( 8918 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:31PM (#22354342) Homepage
    1. Yahoo isn't the smartest kid on the block, but they aren't *that* dumb. Nobody with a vague clue offers "unlimited" bandwidth or storage. And Yahoo has a vague clue.

    2. Isn't it funny that they did this right after the Microsoft takeover offer?

    It's possible that this was already in the works and has nothing to do with MS. But it's just so self-evidently stupid that I wonder if senior executives were involved. What's the strategic angle? Do they now accept an MS takeover as inevitable, and want to discredit MS as much as possible post-takeover (because it will be MSHoo, not Yahoo, who gets sued over the "unlimited" claims)? Or are they hoping to attract so many unprofitable bandwidth leeches that their service becomes undesirable and MS loses interest? Or is there a more subtle angle to this?

    -Graham
  • Mr Guo? does he get unlimited bandwidth and storage?

  • Haham way to shiv Microsoft. (Score:4, Funny)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:49PM (#22354592) Homepage Journal
    heh.
    Oh, your going to buy us? thats great, here's the keys. BTW, we have ten million people using unlimited bandwidth and storage. Good luck.

    The next day every geek int he land is putting up and pulling off 10s of gigs of files.

  • Unlimited bandwidth is cheap for Yahoo to deliver (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @05:51PM (#22354610) Homepage Journal
    Keep in mind that Yahoo can deliver unlimited bandwidth much cheaper than a hosting company can. You have to keep in mind that Yahoo has an expansive network and they are doing settlement-free peering [wikipedia.org] with all of the Tier 1 ISP's, as well as anyone else who happens to be hooked up to a common peering point. Hell, even at our regional hosting center we're connected to a [xand.com]peering point [nyiix.net] and we peer directly with Yahoo, bypassing the Internet.

    The point is that all that bandwidth doesn't cost Yahoo nearly as much as a traditional hosting provider would have to pay for it.
  • I've been using Yahoo webhosting for years and the service is just okay, but I don't ask for very much anyway. So the new plan is actually a significant savings for me and now if I want to place some big multimedia files on my site, I don't have to watch out for bandwidth usage if it gets linked to someone's MySpace account.

    As for a Microsoft buyout, I'll just wait and see. I've stuck with Yahoo mainly because they make a lot of routine things simple and relatively easy. And when I first signed up, I felt l

  • Unlimited == Undetermined (Score:4, Informative)

    by Traa ( 158207 ) on Friday February 08, 2008 @06:16PM (#22354916) Homepage Journal
    http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/ [yahoo.com]

    Lots of disclaimers. No hard numbers. Definitely nothing to do with unlimited.
  • So basically its the new paid version of Geocities?

    Oh well, I guess at least for the next month or so before people start being told that there actually are bandwidth limits, every torrent in the world will have like an extra 5 web-hosts...

    obviously it's gonna have a clause that says no illegal activities, but you know people would try anyway...

  • !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC (Score:4, Funny)

    by fulldecent ( 598482 ) * on Friday February 08, 2008 @10:18PM (#22356974) Homepage
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.yahoo.com/~w3/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

    Looks like we just solved W3C's problem.

Slashdot Top Deals

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny. -- Frank Hubbard

Close