The best things in life ain't free

I'm trying a bit of a social experiment with my site now since I'm getting it out of parked mode. Since my employer does some stuff with ads I thought throw my hat into the ring and see what happens. No pictures, no crazy blinkenlights, just your normal google ads. The reason is because my co-located server doesn't pay for itself and I'm trying to at least recoup some cost. We'll see if it's worth it. It'll be fun to see what happens.

What IS free I've discovered is deduplication. That seems to be the hot item with storage vendors these days. I've decided that the harder a vendor tries to sell you something the more expensive it is, and dedupe is no exception. Vendors like Datadomain (now EMC), FalconStor, Quantum, and many others are all hawking their wares to make mid size and larger buy dedupe, and it's not anywhere close to cheap, and it many cases it's hard to sell it upstairs since it's got such a premium. Meanwhile, ZFS already has introduced dedupe, Btrfs is working on it. Dedupe will be a commodity in a matter of years. I'm just waiting for the day it ends up on FreeNAS. That'll certainly change the game.