These days, people are using the Internet by growing numbers. The amount of webpages and files online just keeps on growing exponentially by the day.
Could the Internet someday just become saturated and run out of space?
Someday, there won’t be any space left to put new stuff on the web!
As long as people keep manufacuring harddrives, there’s no need to worry about the internet running out of space - all the 'net is is millions of servers connected to one another.
Physically, probably not. Data storage technologies are advancing as fast as we are creating the need to store new data, and the relative cost of mass storage is continually decreasing. However, we are in fact running out of available IP addresses, at least according to the current IP4 standard. Do an internet search on IP v.6 - This new standard is an attempt to address the problem of address saturation.
-FK
Welcome to the SDMB.
If you are asking if the Internet will ever run out of physical storage space, then the answer is “very unlikely”. After all, I can always buy another hard drive and attach it to my web server. Though in theory we could max out once we have covered every square inch of the Earth’s surface with file servers, that point is extremely unlikely to ever be reached.
On the other hand, the Internet may eventually run out of address space. All Internet domains have a unique IP address assigned to them. IP addresses are of the form nn.nn.nn.nn where “nn” is a number between 0 and 255.
Obviously the number of possible IP addresses is very large but finite and, if new domains continue to be assigned, eventually they will run out. The organizations that are responsible for standards on the Internet are working on coming up with a new IP address scheme that would allow for more numbers, the problem is making sure that the new scheme does not instantly crash every existing method of accessing the 'net.
Nope. The web is a bunch of computers connected by (more or less) datalinks. Add a new computer, get a URL, and voila! you have a new place to put stuff.
Recommended reading for anyone who doesn’t really understand how the Internet does what it does: How the internet infrastructure works.
not possible. the internet is not a thing. so it can not run out of room. its like saying “can cups run out of room to hold water”.
yeah… maybe one cup can… but its unlikely the concept of all cups on earth are gonna run out.
So is my calculation right in that there are only 255^4 IP addresses available? Over four billion addresses sounds like a lot at first, but not really a lot considering the world population.
You are just about correct, aeropl, there are currently 256^4 unique IP addresses in IPv4 (though many are for practical purposes unusable because they become network or broadcast addresses, due to subnetting.) Right now IPv4 is the Internet standard. IPv6 is in the works, which will increase the total number of unique addresses from 2^32 (same as 256^4) to 2^128.
Yeah, that’s why the move to IPv6 - 128 bits of addressing excitement instead of a measly 32. Whilst IPv4 gives you 255^4, or 4 billion base sites, with IPV6 you get 3.4x10^38, which is lots. (One for every grain of sand on earth, it’s said. Certainly hundreds for each of the spots your feet take up.)
As for running out of room, why not? I’m guessing the URL bar can fit a fixed number of characters, so even if every IP address uses every possible subdirectory structure, you’re going to run out eventually.
Lets say we use only 40 keyboard characters (26 letters + 10 numbers + 4 symbolic for even-ness) I don’t know what it is for the version of Mozilla I’m running, but IE5 has a limit for the URL of 4095 characters. Taking that as the limiting factor, I’m guessing there can be no more than about 255^4 * 40^4000 “pages” addressable through your average browser.
That’s a bit bigger than 7 followed by 6590 zeroes. Don’t worry, I’m only taking up a few thousand of them, and I’m willing to share. 
Well, 4 billion addresses sounds like a lot, but leaving aside that some are unusable for one reason or another, the real problem is that they are used inefficiently. For example, my dept has an 8 bit mask which means we can have 256 (or 254 actually) addresses but I imagine that even if every staff and every grad student has one (which isn’t actually true), we are probably not using half of them. And the university has a 16 bit mask, which means 16,000 and change addresses and I doubt if 20% of them are actually in use at any one time (there is a lot of dynamic addressing on dial-ups and those addresses are reused). The upshot is that the usage of those 4 billion addresses is relatively sparse and yes they are running out. At 128 bit addressing, I imagine we could address every electron on the earth. But I could see wanting to address every electric switch, so it makes sense.
As an aside, the original Arpa net used an 8 bit address space because it was unimaginable that anyone would want to connect more than 256 computers! This was changed to 32 bits sometime in the early 80s and was apparently a very traumatic experience. It was again unimaginable that four billion addresses wouldn’t be enough for forever. 128 seems like overkill, but who knows?
Nah, the Internet will never run out of r
No, the Internet won’t run out of space. They clean it every April 1st.
In case anyone missed elmwood’s reference: