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Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

blog.sia.tech

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Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#271

Post by vidarh »

arcticbull wrote: post #70
Taek wrote: 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…

They probably could,but they're showing no sign of wanting to compete on cost.

E.g bandwidth costs on AWS are high enough that if you actually serve up lots of data from S3 you can typically afford to rent servers to cache all of it 'in front' of AWS and still save a ton of money.

S3 only gets close to competitive if you never access the data from outside of AWS.

Which gets to the point: If you use an AWS service like S3, you pretty much has to use other AWS services if you want the cost to be even somewhat reasonable in aggregate.

They don't need to compete on cost, because once they get you to buy into one set of services, moving any one set of services off AWS gets more painful and/or costly, and a full migration looks too scary for most people.

S3 will never be priced to undercut anything but big players for that reason. They need to be competitive with Google and Azure, because those guys can offer to offset transitioning costs and generally aggressively target AWS customers.

A small player isn't the same threat even if substantially cheaper.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#272

Post by Dylan16807 »

notyourday wrote: post #221
paulryanrogers wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did that include network IO to retrieve your data?

Nope. That's what actually kills you on Amazon - network costs.

It's... interesting... that Amazon offers reasonably priced bandwidth on Lightsail, but it's against the TOS to use it in connection with other services.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#273

Post by Dylan16807 »

teknopurge wrote: post #260
Aunche wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why the post is a red-herring. You cannot use storage if you cannot get to it. Talking about the price of disk space/mth is absolutely useless without talking about the bandwidth required to use it, which means, if you want to go big-boys-math, 95% bandwidth and peering agreement pricing. That $1.50 with all the network chatter between hosts for replication/repair/etc., not to mention actually _downloading_ o…

> not to mention actually _downloading_ of the data from the Sia network will take that $1.50/TB/mth to $70/TB/mth

You really need to back that math up.

Here's my math: 10mbps is over 3TB per month at max utilization, so let's say it's good enough for either 2TB throughput with semi-even use, or 1TB throughput if the use is really focused on part of the day.

When buying transit in bulk in the US, Google tells me that 10mbps was very roughly $8.50 a month in 2017, $4.50 a month in 2018, and $2.50 a month in 2019.

Are you expecting the data to be rebuilt every single day or something?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#274

Post by Dylan16807 »

Aeolun wrote: post #147
TrueDuality wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze is operating at their own economy of scale with dedicated deals with suppliers, custom bare bones hardware, optimized processes, etc. It's always more expensive starting out as a little company for raw hardware and processes until you're big enough and mature enough to get the deals and processes in place. That is also not the only service that Backblaze offers and wasn't their first. It could be that B2 is…

If all their other customers on the $5/month unlimited backup plan store less than 1TB, but since it’s really aggressive about backing up everything (no, please don’t back up my steam games) on your computer I think they go over that.

Here's the histogram from their AMA: https://i.imgur.com/iVEuwUT.jpg

About a third of the users are under 100GB.

Another third is under 500GB.

13% from 500GB to 1TB.

9% from 1TB to 2TB.

8% from 2TB to 5TB.

5% above that.

And they cited raw costs of over $3.50 per TB. But of course that's with real datacenters and non-shoddy equipment.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#275

Post by statictype »

tw04 wrote: post #257
statictype wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does object-based mean? How is an object different from a file (which I presumed was a collection of blocks)?

It means you access your object through a GUID. Think about it like parking your own car vs. a valet. When you park your own car you need to know the address of the garage you parked in, the floor you were on, and the spot you were in. When you valet park, you hand the attendant a ticket and he brings your car back. With a standard fileshare, you need to walk the filesystem to retrieve your file - this incurs a ton o…

Got it. Thanks for explaining.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#276

Post by risyachka »

arcticbull wrote: post #70
Taek wrote: 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…

Amazon has huge margins. They could sell you the same services for waaaaaay less money. They just won't.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#277

Post by bscphil »

comex wrote: post #95
caymanjim wrote: post #81

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! :)

Although it's certainly a typo, ~6 Mbits a second isn't enough for more than poor quality 1080p video, roughly equivalent to streaming from Netflix or Hulu. If you were streaming a backup of a UHD Bluray, for example, the bitrate could be over 100 Mbps.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#278

Post by chiefsucker »

johnklos wrote: post #230

Big deal. I charge $5 per TB per month and I'm not even trying to be cheap. The economies of scale should make this much less expensive. Colocating your own machine in a real datacenter and hosting your own data shouldn't still be cheaper than practically all of "the cloud" offerings, but it is. What does that tell you about "the cloud"? It's marketing bullshit. Sure, it's fine for occasional use, but anyone using th…

That’s not really surprising, but people tend to forget about it. In the end somebody has to pay for ops. It’s business as usual, like it was a century ago.

There are cases where you can indeed save money by doing more by yourself. But how much time does it cost you and how much is your time worth?

How much time do you need to research, purchase, and eventually build your hardware? How much time do you need to get a decent data center deal? How much time do you need to bootstrap your setup? How much time do you need to regularly maintain your infrastructure?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#279

Post by pedrocr »

mallets wrote: post #225
pedrocr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can see on the website that block storage consists of SSDs priced at ~50€/month/TB which is a non-starter. The cloud instances are incredibly cheap though, I may have a look at those.

Check out their storage box if using their cloud instances. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=ot €10 for 2TB and unlimited transfer within same datacenter (or 10TB if accessing from outside). You will get a 1Gbps or more transfer speed and many options for mounting the storage (SCP, webdav, etc). I used to use them as a intermediate backup location when I used their cloud instances and dedi servers.

That's starting to look quite interesting, thanks! 5TB of rsyncable storage for 22€/month could definitely replace one of my NAS boxes. The 10 concurrent connections are the only big limitation really. Not being able to run my own stuff is also not ideal. But it's the kind of thing I've envisioned to stop using a NAS and just point syncer at:

https://github.com/pedrocr/syncer/

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