There are a couple of interesting infrastructure/business trends driving this across providers. The call out of 12ct for throughput and 2ct for storage actuall

There are a couple of interesting infrastructure/business trends driving this across providers. The call out of 12ct for throughput and 2ct for storage actually reflects a typical blended data environment. In short, data access frequency definitely follows the pareto principle. The vast majority of data is write only, with very little of it being accessed frequently. For those generalized storage populations the pricing actually aligns. Related is the issue of "stalled" throughput of dense storage like HDD. 4 years ago it was 4TB spindles at 5-7,200 RPM. We're up to 10TB per spindle these days. But rotational latency is still 5-7K rpm, limiting throughput to say 20-200MB/s depending on how much you like latency and queueing. As I recall HDDs are going to be up to ~20TB per spindle over the next few years. And still 5-7K rpm. Storage keeps getting cheaper, throughput is not. And lastly its really important that youre not paying for traffic. Youre paying for your providers network. That's their datacenters, their backbone, their leased fiber investments, their hundreds of millions in capital. It's not something as simple as "oh I can get cogent for $0.2/mbs." It's an old post, but for idea see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7479030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7479030.