[toomuchtodo]

Storing on your own hardware will always be cheaper (Backblaze has a great blog post on explaining why they built out their own data storage nodes at rented colo space because of this).

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-...

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/co... (Cost of a Petabyte by service vs DIY)

[scarface74]

If the one Backblaze data center gets hit by a meteor, all your data is toast. I use BackBlaze for backups, I wouldn't trust them for primary storage.

[toomuchtodo]

Same with every other cloud provider. They don't provide georedundancy unless you design for it and pay for extra copies of your data to be stored.

[scarface74]

You don't have to "design for it". The default storage class for S3 is your data is automstically copied across three data centers. You have to explicitly specify "reduced redundancy". Yes you pay for it, but you don't have to do anything special.

[toomuchtodo]

Not three data centers. Different zones in the same geographic datacenter. Significant difference.

[scarface74]

I purposefully didn't use Amazon's wording because it would be confusing to someone who doesn't know about AWS.

An "availability zone" is an isolated data center. A "region" is a group of availability zones that are geographically isolated but somewhat close to each other.

For instance, three availability zones (data centers) that are within 100 miles (making up a distance) would make up a region.

[toomuchtodo]

All of AWS' "zones" are very close to each other based on measured network latency between zone resources.