How do we have so much space to store and share internet content? Wouldn’t we run out of space at some point because you can only build so many data or cloud servers?

Question

With literally billions of internet users sharing billions of bytes of data every day there must be an endpoint where the servers can no longer handle the traffic anymore. I see this all the time with websites crashing because too many users try to access the same website at once.

In: 2

Answer 1

Data storage density (amount of data per given volume) has doubled every three years since magnetic storage was developed in the mid 1950s. On top of that, technologies have been developed to split the load of transporting data across the Internet. Plus, large fiber optic networks have been installed around the world providing enormous bandwidth for data transfer.

As for websites crashing under load, that’s usually an issue with the code of the site, rather than particular hardware limitations like you’d see in the late 90s. Cloud computing services offer rapid scaling and elasticity, where additional virtual machines are provisioned on a temporary basis to handle spikes in load.