I'm curious about how websites deal with the problem of continuously
growing data. For example, there are many forums that preserve all
posts for many years back, and are continuously receiving and storing
new posts all the time. No website has access to an infinite amount of
storage space, so:
What kind of buffer (i.e. space available) do they like to have, or in
other words, how much time do they have before they would run out of
space based on the rate of data growth and storage space?
What do they do when they are running out of space on a particular
machine; how do they increase their storage space?
Is maintaining this kind of data stream (like a forum) feasible for a
small-scale website, like one that I might want to host from my own
computer (with about 20 GB of space left) or from a cheap web host
(that probably wouldn't offer me any more than something like 60 GB)?
Thanks,
bgold12