Affordable and Plentiful Storage
One of the main issues facing webmasters is storage, or rather the lack of it. In typical cases, web hosts offer 'unlimited' packages which in reality turn out to be limited to only a few hundred megabytes storage. The main motivator for this is the use of expensive SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) disks.
SCSI disks are '100% duty cycle' which means that they are capable of operating continually with no gap between disk reads and writes. In the context of RunningSites, where only 50-100 websites will be hosted on each physical node, this is not required and higher-capacity IDE drives can be used.
Our initial configuration is servers containing 2 500GB disks in RAID 1 configuration, which is more than enough for all of the needs of 100 websites with plenty to spare; however, we anticipate upgrading disk capacity every 12 to 18 months, following the upward trend of IDE SATA capability and staying just behind the 'bleeding edge' in order to have stable drive firmware. For 2009 we anticipate upgrading from 500GB RAID1 to 1TB RAID1.