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How do smugmug and other services offer "unlimited" original image storage
How do smugmug and other services offer "unlimited" original image storage while using S3 or any other storage service?!
- latchkey 3y agoThey don't use S3. They either host it themselves or they use something like Wasabi, which is a fraction of the cost. https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/ https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/
- marsilinou97 3y agoI saw an article sometime back they they're built on AWS. However, even if they're using a cheaper alternative like wasabi or R2, the cost still will quickly add up while data accumulate over time making their operational cost growing MoM. How is is business model is profitable after 10 or 20 years?
- KomoD 3y ago> They don't use S3. Wrong. > The company hosts its primary photo-serving application on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store all photo and video data. “We were one of the first customers to use Amazon S3, and we’re now all-in on AWS,” says Meyers. “AWS takes care of the heavy lifting for us, so we can focus on what we do best—reliably storing and delivering photos and videos.”
- billy99k 3y agoThey can hopefully convert enough of the free users to premium users to cover the costs. They've been in business a long time, so it does seem like it's working.
- KomoD 3y agoI can think of several possible reasons: - They store a lot so they get discounts - They use Infrequent Access, much cheaper than standard - Some users may cost a lot less than their subscription fees helping to offset some of the costs? (not storing a lot of photos or whatever) - They might use Glacier which is a lot cheaper than both IA and standard And so on