How Youtube does not run out of storage space since billions of people are uploading billions of videos since the beginning of Youtube
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They just have a ton of storage space, and they’re always adding more. Like you said, they have to keep adding enough to keep up with everyone’s uploads (500 hours uploaded per minute in 2019). So yes, that’s a lot! Plus they don’t just need to *store* everything, it all has to be online accessible too.
That makes running Youtube very expensive! Thankfully YouTube is owned by Google which is owned by Alphabet. They have many billions of dollars, and need to use a lot of it to build giant data storage centers and server networks all around the world. They use them to store and operate YouTube, as well as Gmail, Google Drive, FitBit, Nest, Waze, etc., which also take up a ton of storage. Building and operating truly massive quantities of data storage is like one of Google/Alphabet’s main actual “products”, which then gets used in different ways.
All that necessary expense is also why there’s more and more YouTube ads and also now YouTube Premium Subscription being aggressively offered to you.
Those billions of people are generating billions of dollars of revenue for YouTube by means of advertising and such. Oh, and YouTube is owned by Google, so they have access to a lot of money anyway.
In addition to the fact that they’re constantly adding storage, I believe YT is also constantly working on new compression strategies to make the most use of their space.
Somewhat [relevant xkcd](https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/).
Google (who owns/operates YouTube) has _a lot_ of disk space. Like, more than you can imagine. Randall Munroe estimated back in 2013 that Google had about 15 _Exabytes_ of data storage capacity. A decade later, they have much _much_ more than what they had back in 2013.
Google consumes a healthy percentage of the planet’s HDD and SSD annual production capability, and they have for decades now. They run data centers all over the planet filled to the brim with disks.
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Great question with an answer that has to do with how YouTube shares computers with many other systems: Google Search, Gmail are two examples.
Search and Email are systems need to be able to access their data extremely fast. If everyone’s email were on a small number of disks, then reading your emails would be very slow, because the disks would be overworked by all the users.
So instead of filling every disk with email, they put a little email on many disks, leaving the rest of the space available. This way when you read the email the disk holding your email isn’t busy serving other people.
The need for disks to be fast is bigger than the need for the space on those disks.
What does this have to do with YouTube? YouTube videos are very large, and aren’t constantly being watched. They don’t have to be retrieved fast. So to avoid waste: all that leftover space is used by YouTube! It’s filled up by videos!
YouTube is an extremely efficient platform and business. Google makes an obscene amount of money off YouTube sure, but there are very few companies who could even compete with google based on the cost to produce the product of YouTube. YouTube’s real enigneering is done in the backend where compression and encoding is ensuring our grandparents Windows 98 tower can still load a 1080p Martha Stewart Thanksgiving special.
80% of Googles revenue is from advertising. 58% search 12% network ads and 12% YouTube ads. Hardware and cloud round out the rest of Alphabets top 5 revenue generators.
it is worth considering the space being used – 15 exabytes was mentioned elsewhere in this thread. 1 exabyte = 1000 petabytes = 1,000,000 TB. So those 15TB HDD – that would be about 75,000 x 15TB drives. You can try to imagine how much volume of space this is – the data centers have them highly packed together – maybe 15 in a “tray” – for accessibility/replacement. So thats 1000 trays – the size of a large room packed floor to ceiling. But allow room for air conditioning and cables. And allow room for redundancy : even 100 hard drives are going to have a failure every few months to a few years, so some aspect of automation can kick out the failing drives, and robots or humans are needed to install new drives.
Now, because google have lots of data centers, the data is going to be replicated – maybe not to each data center, but to a number.
Layer on top of this, the YT client – people playing stuff, and the YT core, has to be able to search and locate the actual items of interest to you – not just the movie/video you are interested in, but also the metadata – adverts, the suggested related items etc.
One can imagine some form of google-search engine sitting on top of this data. A person logs in, and the search engine tries to assemble the page you are viewing, based on who you are and your preferences. The search engine will have information allowing the meta data to be fetched, and when you play something, to assign it to a server to send you the data – in chunks – you dont need the entire movie/song at the point of playing – merely enough data to keep your experience smooth.
With so much storage and computers and air conditioning and electricity, then you need a good sized number of people to monitor for failing hardware, communications blockages or outages, hack attacks and much much more.
It is impressive that it, and many other huge sites, like reddit/amazon/microsoft, can scale so well for so many people, but equally, the cost, to keep this all running, is dependent on keeping people happy. If YT did a “Twitter” and aliented all its users – those data centers, people, storage, comms lines etc are going to keep costing. So, managing this requires very carefully planned out economics planning (do we grow? do we shrink?) Welcome to cloud-compute, and why the skills are so much in demand.
Is amazon the same/different? Yes & no. Amazon doesnt have a core business to serve up user content. Instead much of their business is to house the cloud apps that we all use. The same economic issues arise – how quickly to grow/shrink, how quickly to update machines, processing hardware failures. But Amazon sells this as a service and prides itself on availability and technical functionality. Google has tried to do the same with the google Cloud platform, but not as successfully. Microsoft have also done this, but more successfully.
Managing huge amount of real estate, looking at geographic tax breaks, and, watching out for geo-political issues that could cause real harm (think: russia, middle east, china): it does not come cheap. Hence why, rivals to YT and Amazon are rare. It takes years to find and build a data center.
Google, Facebook, even eBay have multitudes of employees who open packgages, add hard drives to servers, mount them in racks, load them with the server software, connect them, and turn them on. All day long, in hundreds of data centers, multiple people do nothing but add additional servers. When the data center is full another one has just finished building and they start filling it. Forever.
Google for images of data centers.
Not gonna lie, it’s a lot. A looooooot. But these data centers are pretty massive. Let’s say it took 1 6 story apartment building packed with hard drive racks to do it. Well adding a 2nd building isn’t that much of a problem. Even 4 more isn’t a problem. Sure eventually we’ll run out of space but actually technology is improving and what used to be a hard drive to store 256mb, is now storing 16tb in the same physical space.
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