Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#1

Post by dpapathanasiou » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 8:45 PM UTC

I'm working on a new neural network based project, which means I'll need to access and store more data than I can keep on my hard drives.

While I'm familiar with AWS S3 from my day job, I was wondering what other alternatives are out there that may be cheaper (or even free)?

I'm also aware of dropbox, google docs, etc., but ideally I'd like to have programmatic access via an API.

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#2

Post by heartbeats » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

Depending on your needs, you can rent a dedicated server with hard drives. For example, Hetzner has an offering of 10x 10TB HDDs for $200/month or so.

Disclaimer: I have never used Hetzner's services nor can I vouch for them.

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#3

Post by nicoburns » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

Backblaze B2

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#4

Post by okneil » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#5

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:08 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#6

Post by stu2010 » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

If you can tolerate risk of data loss, VPS or even physical hosts are likely to be far cheaper than any cloud. Look at OVH, Hetzner, Linode, DigitalOcean.

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#7

Post by crobibero » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

Wasabi is decently inexpensive at $.0059 per GB/month https://wasabi.com/

I currently use it as my personal cloud backup

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#8

Post by rmeertens » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

Keep in mind that if you use this data often as training data you want to store it close to your GPU. No point in saving money on the data storage and have your expensive GPU idle because you are waiting for data to download from Dropbox...

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#9

Post by invisiblerobot » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

s3 may be cheaper than you think.

If you're willing to tolerate hr+ delays in accessing your data aws glacier deep archive is 70cents per terabyte month.

that's pretty awesome in my book.

If you need to access the data in under an hr it comes out around $2 per TB/mo

Re: Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3?

#10

Post by freefaler » Mon, Feb 17, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

heartbeats wrote: post #2

Depending on your needs, you can rent a dedicated server with hard drives. For example, Hetzner has an offering of 10x 10TB HDDs for $200/month or so. Disclaimer: I have never used Hetzner's services nor can I vouch for them.

I've used them for the last 5 years. They are OK. Their network is not redundant (core routers) so you should expect some downtime at least once per year for several hours. But it's the only complaint I have. The good part is that you can buy several servers for 100-200 EUR and build a decent HA with fixed monthly cost. Our AWS bill was always hard to predict. Also, they have a VPS cloud service that is decent and we use it for non-core services.