Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#321

Post by johnklos » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

chiefsucker wrote: post #278

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…

Those are all just "cloud" talking points.

My time is worth a tremendous amount to me, which means I want to use my own hardware. "The cloud" does not guarantee reliability.

Any company that does any project that even slightly regularly requires compute / storage can easily justify the time to do all the things you mentioned.

The fact that many companies have gone towards "the cloud" goes hand-in-hand with the fact that many companies use Windows. It's clearly not the best thing to use to get things done, but the IT people don't want to reduce their importance and the management people like the kickbacks and perks they get from buying certain thing from certain companies.

The savings look good on paper, but the reality is that they're based on leaving out lots of information. I've helped several companies move from "the cloud" back to good, local compute resources because of the amount of money they were hemorrhaging to "cloud" providers.

For the most part, it's all marketing bullshit.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#322

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

NohatCoder wrote: post #319

Dylan16807 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there was a demand for sorta-reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Amazon's goal is to get people to pay a premium to get access to their entire ecosystem of services. They don't optimize the price of each individual service. There's a lot of take it or leave it for their specific offerings. Look at how they used to have reduced redundancy as a cost saver, but don't anymore. If you want co…

Where did you get those prices? I can't find anything cheaper than $4 per TB month at both Google and Amazon.

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

Glacier Deep Archive is .99/TB/month in US East and EU Ireland and several others, plus $2.50/TB bulk retrieval.

https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing

Archive Storage is $1.20/TB/month in us-east1 and europe-west1 and several others. But (instant) retrieval is $50/TB, with no options...

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#323

Post by fragmede » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #311

Taek wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, is this it? Dropbox designer challenges the project broadly, gets top comment, Author refutes – and we leave it at that? I mean this is basically the moment where I would expect every systems designer on HN coming out of the woods and crushing Sia into the ground, if there were, in fact, any ground at all to crush Sia into. Is this actually legit? If so, where is the rejoicing? What am I missing?

Dropbox designer name dropped "64-of-96 RS encoding" as if they're the only person that's heard of, or dealt with Reed-solomon encoding before, and expected the author to get scared off. There is, in the case of drop box, plenty of ground to crush Sia into. That is the ground between the 95% and multiple-nines of availability.

Engineering is about tradeoffs. I could build a network as good as Google's with infinite money, infinite time, and infinite help. I could design a product as beautify as Apple's with the same lack of limitations. Unfortunately for me, I have limited money, limited time, and limited help. Every systems designer understands that, innately, so isn't rushing out of the woodword because Sia and Dropbox have merely chosen different tradeoffs. That one has IPO'd is uninteresting in the abstract. It's just money after all.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#324

Post by zupa-hu » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

Does any consumer grade motherboard have IPMI* support? When I tried to optimize my server costs one issue I ran into was that colocation providers require IPMI capability, which seems only available in server-grade motherboards.

* IPMI is for remote hardware management

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#325

Post by zupa-hu » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

zupa-hu wrote: post #324

Does any consumer grade motherboard have IPMI* support? When I tried to optimize my server costs one issue I ran into was that colocation providers require IPMI capability, which seems only available in server-grade motherboards. * IPMI is for remote hardware management

To elaborate, while I like such optimization efforts, for this to work you'd need to run your own datacenter because the _ones I have found_ that offer cheap bandwidth require IPMI (to lower their labor costs).

Or you need to know some providers I don't know, in which case, tell me. :)

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#326

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#327

Post by nojvek » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

enaaem wrote: post #179

throwaway9878 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody with more money than you can always undercut you in anything you ever do so why bother ever trying to do anything

Very good point! Let's say you move into a new market, trying to undercut the status quo. The status quo, with their power of scale and experience can just undercut you back. Who is benefitting from this? The customers! So if the customers want more competition they have to pay you to play. Which means they have to co-invest with you and promise to buy your service later. A good is example are the Apple iPhone screen…

Not really. Suppose giant A undercuts startup B where A is making a temporary loss but B runs out of money trying to complete, only A remains in the market and A starts charging a premium since it doesn’t have completion.

This is bad for customers in the long term. Like how Amazon is slowly destroying brick and mortar stores, or having Amazon Basics at the front undercutting other sellers. Monopolies mean you don’t have an open fair market anymore.

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#328

Post by ubercow13 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #35

ajross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per-site reliability (beyond a stated/assumed 95%, which is right around the "I put a computer on my desk" level) isn't a design goal, though. You can argue with their math or their assumptions, but you can't say they're wrong for not designing in the reliability features you list above.

Things on my desk are meeting three nines or better of uptime at present, 95% would be 18 days hard down per year.

Which should give you even more confidence in Sia's reliability, no?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#329

Post by ubercow13 » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 7:56 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #163

harias wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try GSuite Business account with 5 accounts? Google offers unlimited cloud storage if you get more than 5 accounts (5*12 = 60 USD/month and no egress)

It's 'unlimited' until you use it too much, and then all your google accounts will get perma-banned...

Any evidence of that? Isn't it likely that Google has plenty of commercial customers using this service with large amounts of data?

Re: Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month

#330

Post by prophesi » Sat, Mar 07, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

aschatten wrote: post #181

prophesi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first few months, you'll basically have all of your Sia drained as your contracts start coming in and your host wallet gives them collateral. But yeah, my contracts only recently started to complete, and I've got the amount of Sia I started with at the very least. So... Yes, but probably not very much? Particularly when accounting for the price drop in Sia. Edit: If you do decide to host, it'll likely be abou…

Can you share more info on cost breakdown and earnings? Also, how expensive is electricity in your area?

I wouldn't try hosting on Sia if you're trying to make a profit. I spent 20USD on Sia currency. And I didn't go out and purchase a RPi + harddrive for it. You likely wouldn't make a profit if you did. RPi's are great for costing next to nothing in electricity, though.