Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by squiguy7 3886 days ago
I think the unlimited storage is very appealing to the consumer. For example, Amazon has S3 priced per GB. For the average user, they do not want to sit down and calculate how much their cloud storage is going to cost them. Instead, knowing that they can just keep uploading and not worry about it is best.

But at the end of the day, there needs to be some limit as you alluded to.

1 comments

The S3 price per GB is less of a problem for the people I know than the outbound bandwidth pricing.
Ah touche. That is something even I overlooked!
Woe betide anyone who uses Amazon Glacier for backup without paying close attention to the pricing.

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

Retrieval pricing...

I got bitten really badly by this a while ago when trying to migrate some servers about.

3TB of storage would cost £21/month just to have it sat in Glacier. This isn't too bad, I suppose, but when you then need retrieve it, you're looking at an additional £270.

That depends, because you can actually recover it for free over a long enough time period. It's easy if you plan your file sizes in advance based on your allowance, and don't need it in a hurry.

Your bill is based on your peak retrieval rate multiplied by the number of hours in the month.

But you can retrieve a calculable amount an hour, for free, all month, for however long it takes to get your files back. You could also pay a little bit more, and get them back much after.

You certainly wouldn't want to request all 3TB at once though.(It would be billed spread over four hours, and it'd still be thousands.)

You can request ranges of files, so even if you have massive files, you can still throttle the requests to below a given threshold if you're careful.

At that rate you might as well request more data and use snowball.
Never seen the snowball before -it's shiny looking hardware. No idea what the actual cost works out like, though. 1 petabyte per week they claim...

At the moment I'd be interested in backing up my NAS boxes, which is only about 36tb raw or 23tb usable space. It's a lot, but nowhere near snowball sizes :)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...