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Is Dropbox working on moving to its own hardware? It seems like being bound to S3 must be a big business risk for them.
by artursapek 12y ago
Is Dropbox working on moving to its own hardware? It seems like being bound to S3 must be a big business risk for them.
- minimaxir 12y agoDropbox's business strategies (Carousel) and acquisitions ("Dropbox for Music", "Dropbox for Documents") make it seem like Dropbox is opting for diversity instead of opting for efficiency, that could be passed down to the end-user with lower prices.
- cwyers 12y agoAnd that's probably wise -- it's not like the markup on S3 is so huge that it's an obvious big win to move off it once you consider the size of the up-front investment to build up a similarly featured, distributed and redundant cloud storage system of their own. Diversification is a good idea for them, I just think it's a very low probability of success.
- vidarh 12y agoUnless they have substantial discounts over the public S3 prices (which is certainly possible - even likely), you can cut 50% or more off the S3 costs very easily. The AWS markups are crazy high. You can even save substantial money over "pure" S3 just by proxying and caching requests for the most heavily trafficked objects somewhere with lower bandwidth costs.
- cwyers 12y agoWe don't know the rate they're getting, except that it's likely that it's lower than the public rate. They DO know what the rate is, and they're still using S3.
- amalag 12y agoDropbox can merge with Backblaze ;-)
- res0nat0r 12y agoAll of the syncing is done via ec2 instances, so moving the backend storage offsite would cost a ton more, and be a lot slower :(
- amalag 12y agoIf you have a machine for storage, you can assume you will have a machine next to it (or on it) for syncing. Anyway they have to pay for their sync machines but at their scale I don't know if it would cost more than ec2.