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Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

blog.sia.tech

131–140 of 353 posts

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#131
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's dig into networking. Who pays for rereplication traffic? If you do 64-of-96 RS encoding, that means for every failure you need to transfer 64x the lost storage capacity. If you're targeting a "low individual uptime but high aggregate uptime" model this means you need to be storing data in multiple sites -- and dedicated cross-geo bandwidth is expensive. I agree that in the happy case you can use low-bandw…

I think his point is that he's targeting low aggregate uptime, too.

Definitely not, aggregate uptime is extremely high. We've never seen downtime do to network outages, only software bugs. And even then, only some users were impacted by the bugs, we've never in 5 years had a broad outage.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#133
post #56

In 2018, I spent about six weeks running a series of tests to measure Sia's real world costs. At that time, storage cost ~$4.50/TB on Sia to back up large real world files (backups of DVDs and Blu-Rays).[0] Community members have re-run my tests every few months, most recently in October 2019, when the cost was measured at $1.31/TB, though it's worth noting that recent tests use synthetic data optimized to minimize S…

Another cost associated with your 2nd point is the collateral a host would have to burn to comply with take-down notices.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#134
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redundancy, I assume. Lots of unreliable facilities and nodes can be very durable in aggregate.

Sounds kinda like the people who thought that bundling a bunch of bad mortgage debt together in slices could get it rated AAA.

Your mind is going to be blown when you learn how TCP/IP works.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#136
post #127
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's dig into networking. Who pays for rereplication traffic? If you do 64-of-96 RS encoding, that means for every failure you need to transfer 64x the lost storage capacity. If you're targeting a "low individual uptime but high aggregate uptime" model this means you need to be storing data in multiple sites -- and dedicated cross-geo bandwidth is expensive. I agree that in the happy case you can use low-bandw…

Sure! First up, we don't do repairs every time one host goes down. Standard practice on the network is to wait to do a repair until a full 25% of the redundancy is missing (in 64-of-96, that would be 8 hosts offline). Then you repair all 8 at once, significantly reducing the total amount of repair traffic. But secondly, offline doesn't usually mean dead and gone, with unstable datacenters like this they are usually b…

That sounds incredibly energy-inefficient. On average you have 12.5% of servers running but not contributing and possibly incurring load on other nodes.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#137
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is $10/TB/mo, which is the "old" industry standard (and still what most big guys charge). Backblaze is $5, but they charge egress fees, so usage matters. Dropbox doesn't charge for egress, but there are limits on "Public" folder bandwidth (and you can't pay for more if you max out). I don't think there are limits on private content, but I bet there's a soft throttle or some limit that will get you contacted.…

Surely you mean Mbit, unless you’re streaming uncompressed video for some reason! :)

I'd love to see someone try running a TV network off of DO spaces :)

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#138
post #14

> That means about 2 hours of labor per rig. We’ll call that $50 Does that seem low to anyone else? I don’t really have any background in the area, but 25/hr cost to the company would be less than 20/hr pay for the skilled labor. Other countries are different of course, but in US I could make that much flipping burgers in the right area.

In some developed countries you can get qualified labor that cheap. For example in Southern or Eastern Europe. Not to mention developing countries of course.

Not to mention, this work isn't technical in nature. It's very quick to pick up, probably more so than landscaping tbh.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#139
post #122
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redundancy, I assume. Lots of unreliable facilities and nodes can be very durable in aggregate.

Redundancy is kind of meaningless unless if you have sufficient diversity. If all your replicas are located on the same rack, you're screwed if there is a minor disaster like a sprinkler going off.

You will be able to boast of 99.9999% uptime up until that sprinkler goes of. And with luck, it could be decades until it does.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#140
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut. Sia systems don't need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don't mind having extra milliseconds added, etc,…

Here's the issue. We know that due to economy of scale and domain experience, AWS will always have the lowest cost (to Amazon) for storage -- whether that's totally-reliable storage, or sorta-reliable. If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Then, blockchain adds inefficiency. Therefore, it's basically impossible for any blockchain solution to have a lower total co…

Sia is a lot more than a low cost storage platform. It's a full reimagining of how the cloud should work with an emphasis on user ownership and control, open access for developers, and ultimately decentralization that allows users to be certain their applications will always work (no more "RSS Reader is shutting down").

This post is intended to address people who do not feel that decentralization can be cost effective at scale.

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