We're obviously coming from different backgrounds here - do you work at Google or similar ? 'Downright cheap' is a Heroku instance or two. 'Affordable' is 20 o

We're obviously coming from different backgrounds here - do you work at Google or similar ? 'Downright cheap' is a Heroku instance or two. 'Affordable' is 20 or so servers with a few TB of drive space each in a cluster with a few backups. Petabytes of data needs a huge number of servers and dedicated personal to look after - I don't know how that can be regarded as 'downright cheap'. If you're in a position to handle petabytes of data you're probably going to roll your own data center with custom software ala Google's bigtable. This definitely isn't the market that these little startups are targeting as far as I can see. The OPs critique is very well founded.