Don’t tell me “the cloud”. Why does the cloud not get full? Will the internet ever not have enough space?
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the internet not a single thing, it’s whole bunch of computers spread around the world, if one runs out of space just buy more hard drives
It’s being built/expanded/upgraded as fast as we fill it up (with headroom).
You can make a program that allows people to store their files on your computer while you’re on the internet. When the disk is full, you add more disks. Running this service for the people starts hurting your wallet, so you start asking people to pay for storing files on your computer. You use some of the money to buy more even computers and more hard drives and a better internet connection. You run out of room so you purchase a couple of warehouses and start running the computers there. Boom, you’re Bezos.
We keep adding space. So far, increases in the efficiency of computer memory have kept pace with the increasing demand for memory in such a way that this has been relatively painless. You could theoretically strain the internet if you started doing wasteful things like storing every frame of every video as an uncompressed bitmap, but we’ve also been good at accepting whatever amount of compression and definition loss is necessary to make the media stored on the internet practical, and the aforementioned improvements in memory efficiency have only increased these standards over time.
In purely physical terms, we never have to run out of digital storage space. Most of the materials are cheap and abundant, and server farms take up way less space than food farms. If we ever invented a medium that was super data-intensive (maybe some sort of recording of literal human memory?), there could be economic pressures to use it less because it takes up so much space.
The internet consists of millions of individual websites that each take care of having enough space.
Like let’s use something like Reddit as an example. It started out as a small prototype that could run on a laptop.
For a small userbase a single PC that handles all the requests and stores all the data is enough. Once it gets larger it needs multiple servers and lots of storage space.
And once the website goes international and has millions of users it probably has data centers across the globe or uses cloud services like AWS.
The internet doesn’t get full as websites constantly scale up. There’s always someone adding another hard drive to a server somewhere.
As long as we keep building hard drive, we can keep adding more data to the internet. Hard drives are getting more dense (smaller yet holding more data) and cheaper all the time, so we can keep adding more storage capacity all the time. Some comes from building more, larger data centers but also by being able to squeeze more data into the same space over time.
The internet’s not a place. It’s a network. As the name implies, inter(network).
It’s just the way we connect other computers and by proxy other people together. That’s it.
The internet is decentralized. There’s no one single computer anywhere responsible for the internet. It’s a bajillion of computers all talking to each other.
Just like I can always add a new hard drive to my computer or add a new computer to my house, the Internet will never really fill up.
I work in manufacturing. Along with the answers above, companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are spending BILLIONS of dollars on massive Data Center warehouses. These places are huge. We usually land about #6 or #7 in terms of production vs our competitors for our products and we supply enough for 5-6 of these buildings per year. Our competitors are also supplying those products for 5-10 each per year, or more, as well. If I had to guess, there are 60-70 of these massive Data Centers going up every year, filled to the brim with networking and data storage hardware. Imagine how much storage you could fit in a 750,000 square foot warehouse. Then multiply that times 60 or 70. Increasing every year, with a projected growth of 30% over the next 10 years.
A bit of this space is used for their own networking and storage infrastructure, but a ton is leased out as cloud storage as well. Basically the internet lives in these buildings, completely decentralized, in the cloud. And it’s getting bigger all the time.
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