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Aren't these services still wildly overpriced? At $0.0125/GB/month, that means it costs $75 for 6TB per month. But a 6TB hard drive costs less than $300, whic
by devit 11y ago
Aren't these services still wildly overpriced?
At $0.0125/GB/month, that means it costs $75 for 6TB per month.
But a 6TB hard drive costs less than $300, which means that assuming the data is stored on 3 hard drives for redundancy, they break even in less than a year.
However, hard drives seems to last at least 3-5 years on average, so this service seems to be priced at least 3-5 times as much as it costs to Amazon.
And there is even a $0.01/GB charge for retrieval on top.
There are other costs, but they should be relatively small at scale.
Am I missing something? If not, why doesn't anybody compete with Amazon and provide more reasonable pricing?
- ju-st 11y agoGlacier isn't even using hard drives, so their per TB costs should be way lower (raw storage and infrastructure).
- kalleboo 11y ago> Glacier isn't even using hard drives That's still speculation right? Some have theorized they use offline harddisks
- acveilleux 11y agoI would expect offline HDDs as well, possibly combined with tapes for secondary copies to meet durability requirements.
- zzleeper 11y agoMy guess is off site backup is expensive. Also add the electricity costs, CPU etc, engineers, rent, etc. I That probably takes the margin from 80% of price to maybe 40%, in line with most retailers and whatnot
- discodave 11y agoGo look up one of James Hamilton's talks, he breaks down the cost of running datacenters/cloud. 'Servers' are ~50% of the cost, hard drives are of course less than 100% of server costs. So you need to at least double the cost of the hard drive. Tripling the cost of hard drives might be a good assumption for S3/Glacier because you could assume they are building servers where hard drives make up 2/3 the cost of the server.
- threatofrain 11y agoAmazon offers features of reliability which you normally wouldn't attempt to tackle yourself, such as geographically diverse storage and really high reliability rates. You don't have to worry about what technology they use behind the scenes. If you set up your own system, you have to manage all the technology and risk management strategies. Then you can see if you can do it cheaper than Amazon.
- acveilleux 11y agoYou'd need 3 pairs of 6TB hard disks in 3 data centers to match the reliability that S3 provides. So at least 6 HDDs, 1800$ of H/W and the monthly hosting costs for the 3 DCs and presumably 3 server chassis... Plus software to keep them in sync and you need to deal with the inevitable failures that will happen eventually. Amazon guarantees 11 9's worth of durability (99.999999999%). Backblaze sees between 2.41% and 7.77% annual failure rate on 6TB HDDs (source: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/) and they're the only ones publishing numbers like these over sensible number of HDDs.
- imaginenore 11y agoYeah,except you forgot to account for * electricity * labor * bandwidth * cooling * servers, routers, wiring, and other infrastructure * taxes on everything * rent * insurance