Scaling the Internet, and how much more can it grow

We all know the strain that our mobile phones put on us when they tell us that the storage is full and we have to make the ruthless decision on whether to delete a hilarious video or one of our favourite apps. Storage is a strange concept, difficult to grasp in its enormity and so making all of us wonder - could the Internet ever run out of room?

According to Internet Live Stats, there are around 6,000 tweets sent, 40,000+ Google searches searched and 2 million emails sent every single second. That’s a lot of information flying around that needs somewhere to live, meaning the Internet is already huge. According to Nerds Magazine, experts have explained that the visible Internet is a miniscule 0.03% and we couldn’t even measure it if we wanted to.

Looking at the Internet that we can see, if we were to print it out in its entirety Toner Giant have predicted that we could get a quarter of the way to the sun, to the moon and back 107 times and even more outrageous statistics that you can see here. With all that content circulating the web, it’s time we looked into where it’s all going, and whether there is room for more.

Ever watched Star Wars Rogue One? Remember that moment where they have to get the data from the tower on the enemy base to save the world, and it appears to be a library of lights all containing highly sensitive information? Well, that’s what it’s actually like in real life, only in multiple data centres across the world. This gigantic network of computers is dealing with around 2.5 Quintillion bytes of new data each day, storing it on servers capable of holding large volumes of data.

For a data centre to run it needs; electricity, cooling systems, the physical space for the servers to be built on (some of them are enormous) and some serious security. A lot of companies are working towards using renewable energy to make their data centres more energy efficient and Google have actually worked out how to allow their servers to work at a higher temperature to save energy on cooling systems.

In theory, the Internet is only going to run out of space, if we run out of the energy and space that servers need to function. With so much money being pumped into this industry, it’s safe to say it will be a long time before we run out of Internet.