Do you think it is possible for the Internet to eventually run out of room for data?

No, you just keep adding servers.

No, @cockswain‘s right.

The Internet isn’t a big pool or one centralized server – anyone can host something on the web. You could host a website off your home computer if you wanted, and people could access it from anywhere.

It would be slower than accessing a mainstream website, but assuming you were willing to relocate your house closer to an exchange or to a T1 access point, you could eventually serve more and more people simultaneously.

When your computer can no longer simultaneously serve the number of people viewing your website, you add another computer and a load balancer, which shares the request between the two.

Eventually you might think about using server-grade hardware, which is just computers with really fast hard drives and lots of RAM (depending on exactly what type of website it is, there’s lots of different hardware decisions you could make to make your website run faster).

This is a simplified explanation, but I hope it helps.

@richardhenry nice answer. much better than my own

It’s like brain cells that just keep on multiplying. In science fiction people’s heads actually expand to make up for the extra room needed. In computing, we just keep on buying more memory and add computers.

It could get to the point where every inch on earth was covered with memory chips or simms, and then we would have to start putting them in orbit around the earth.

That’s sort of like asking if the radio will run out of room for shows. The radio broadcast system is just a way of transmitting the shows from broadcaster to listener. It doesn’t store them. They exist somewhere other than on the radio waves; the radio waves are just how they are made listenable by an audience.

The Internet is how users access data that is stored somewhere. It isn’t stored on the Internet.

Theoretically, if they stopped making servers, yes. For practical purposes, and as others have explained, no.

@bob_ That would be “stopped making computers”, not just servers. A datacenter I visited in London had a rack with some Mac Minis in it, serving something or other.

@richardhenry Well, aren’t all computers, servers, in the sense that they serve a purpose? Huh? Huh? Think about that.

Yes, there are only 10^80 atoms in the universe and most atoms can’t store more than 30 bits. We’d have to strip mine parallel universes.