They charge $20/TB/month for basic cloud storage. You can build storage servers for $20/TB flat. If you add 10% for local parity, 15% free space, 5% in spare drives, and $2000/rack/month overhead, then triple everything for redundancy purposes, then over a 3 year period the price of using your own hard drives is $115/TB and google's price is $720. Over 5 years it's $145 versus $1200. And that's before they charge you massive bandwidth fees.
I like your comparison with self-built storage, but comparing $20/TB/month with other CLOUD offerings, we see:
* hetzner storage box starts from $4/month for 1TB, and then goes down to $2.4/TB/month if you rent a 10TB box.
* mega starts from €10/month for 2TB, and goes down to €2/TB/month if you get a 16TB plan
* backblaze costs (starts from?) $6/TB/month
I was looking for a cheap cloud storage recently, so have a a list of these numbers :)
Moreover, these are not even the cheapest one. The cheapest one I found had prices starting from $6.5 for 5TB, going down to $0.64/TB/month for plans starting with 25TB (called uloz, but I haven't tested them yet).
Also, looking at lowendbox you can find a VPS in Canada with 2TB storage for $5/month and run whatever you want there.
How all that compares to $20/TB/month?!
Please feel free to correct me if i'm comparing apples to oranges, though. But I can't believe all of these offers are scam or so-called "promotional" offers which cost companies more than you pay for it.
I'm still annoyed they increased the price for B2. Maybe "free" bandwidth gets people to use it more? But as far as their costs go, between the time they launched at $5 and the time they upped it to $6, hard drives (and servers full of hard drives) cost half as much per TB, with 1/4 as many servers needed for the same number of TB.
I get the impression that business has always been about being the best schmoozer more than about having the best product.
BTW at Hetzner you can rent servers with very large (hundred of TB) non-redundant storage for an effective price of about $1.50/TB/month. If you want to build a cloud storage product, that seems like a good starting point - of course, once you take into account redundancy, spare capacity, and paying yourself, the prices you charge to your customers will end up closer to the price of Backblaze at a minimum.
>I get the impression that business has always been about being the best schmoozer more than about having the best product
and thus, market efficiency feels like a myth. This feels most true when it comes to cloud services. They're way overpriced in multiple different common cases at the big providers
That's covered by the build and overhead numbers. But if you want more on the build side, an extra $10k of labor per rack of 9 servers only increases the cost per TB by about $4.
Not to mention that I can:
- Create a bucket and store 1MB in it without any overhead
- Create 50 buckets with strong perimeters around them such that someone deleting the entire account doesn’t bring down the other 49
- Create a bucket and fill it with terabytes of data within seconds and don’t need to wait for hardware to be racked and stacked
- Create a bucket, fill it with 2TB of data, and delete it tomorrow
Cloud is more than bare metal, but plenty of folks discount the cost benefits of elasticity.
I suspect the problem is that we're engineers in domains that have very different needs.
For example, I agree that elasticity is great. But at the same time, to me, it sounds like bad engineering. Why do you need to store terabytes of data and then delete it - couldn't it be processed continuously, streamed, compressed, process changes only, and so on. A lot of engineering today is incredibly wasteful. Maybe your data source doesn't care, and just provides you with terabyte csv files, and you have no choice, but for engineers that care about efficiency, it reeks.
It might make a lot of sense in a highly corporate context where everything is hard, nobody cares, and the cost of inefficiency is just passed on to the customer (i.e. often government and tax payers). But the real problem here is that customers aren't demanding more efficiency.
Alone the fact of audit gives you a lot of reasons to keep data. Even if it gets downsampled one way or the other.
And plenty of use cases have natural growth. I do not throw away my pictures for example.
Data also grows dependent of users. More users, more 'live' data.
We have such a huge advantage with digital, we need to stop thinking its wasteful. Everything we do digital (pictures, finance data, etc.) is so much more energy and space efficient than what we had 20 years ago, we should just not delete data because we feel its wasteful.
Leverage erasure encoding for durability and avoid both the tripling and local parity. You'll get better durability than 3x while only taking up significantly less than 2x the space Backblaze open sourced their library and talk about it here, https://www.backblaze.com/blog/Reed-Solomon. They use a 17:20 ratio that'll get them 3 drive failure resistance for just 1.17x stretch (ie a 100mb file gets that resilient while taking up 117mb of space)
They charge $20/TB/month for basic cloud storage. You can build storage servers for $20/TB flat. If you add 10% for local parity, 15% free space, 5% in spare drives, and $2000/rack/month overhead, then triple everything for redundancy purposes, then over a 3 year period the price of using your own hard drives is $115/TB and google's price is $720. Over 5 years it's $145 versus $1200. And that's before they charge you massive bandwidth fees.