[gprasanth]

I've recently analysed pricing of various storage providers when thinking of building a side project, and I was surprised at how costly the services were.

S3, Drive, Dropbox, Spaces, B2, Box, several Object Storage solutions. Some cases storage was cheap, but the transfer was costly. Everything seemed costly for the simple use case of providing an end user 10GB monthly upload + ~50GB bandwidth at low cost.

A vps with additional storage seemed to be the ~better~ most feasible solution to me.

This sounds like a terrific thing to host on a vps.

[tossimba]

I previously considered the idea of creating a cloud storage solution where customers are only billed for what they use. This was spurred by looking at dropbox's $10/mo plan for 1TB of storage. But I decided against it.

Storage is already free for the average user. 15GB with Google is enough. If you want more, the option is there and not that expensive. $2/mo for 100GB. I see no reason why a consumer would switch to my lesser-known service to save $1/mo. $1 is nothing. So my market would be users that store a lot of data. In that case, $10/mo for 1TB doesn't seem all that bad. Anymore than 1TB, customers probably have a bit of technical knowledge and may aswell store it themselves.

This market is already extremely saturated. Every single big tech name has a part of it.

[CloudBuddy]

Is https://cloudbuddy.cloud something like what you considered creating?

[tossimba]

yeah but not extremely over priced

[codetrotter]

> This sounds like a terrific thing to host on a vps.

Just make sure your provider has backup and redundancy in place for the data storage.

Imagine waking up to total loss of data for all of your customers. Ouch!

[JepZ]

Recently I have become a fan of the Hetzner Cloud:

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us

I don't know how competitive their prices are, but I like their easy to use interface which is complemented by and also easy to use API.

Adding a 7-day automatic backup history is just a matter of about two clicks, and the additional costs seem reasonable to me.

[gregmac]

Nightly backups still mean you can lose up to ~24 hours of data.

This is in stark contrast to, for example, AWS S3. From the FAQ [0]:

> Amazon S3 [is] designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years.

> Amazon S3 ... storage classes redundantly store your objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones (AZs) in an Amazon S3 Region before returning SUCCESS.

In AWS parlance, an AZ is a physical data center, and they're built far enough apart so a fire, flood or tornado will not affect all of them.

There's a reason S3 (and similar) cost so much more than "hard drive attached to a server" storage. If you don't need the durability than of course it is overpriced -- but on the other hand, if you try to provide that level of durability yourself you'll quickly see it's a bargain.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#Durability_.26_Data_Protecti...

[JepZ]

Well, you are comparing apples and oranges here. The equivalent AWS service would be EC2 and not S3. I know that you didn't start with that (as gprasanth put them in the same race), but it should be clear those two have different redundancy levels.

In fact, I don't know where AWS nor Hetzner stores the 'disk' of the VPS or even the backups. And while those are undoubtedly essential attributes for enterprise-level services, I think especially for side projects the usability of the service is quite relevant.

[tyingq]

wasabi.com might be worth looking into. $.0049 per GB/month, no egress charges.

That's roughly $5/month for 1TB, which probably beats doing this on a VPS.

[mafuyu]

Thanks, hadn't heard of Wasabi before. The storage pricing is comparable with B2, but no egress charges is nice. Any have experience with this provider?

[jermaustin1]

So after reading their pricing FAQ, it looks like you are billed for a minimum of 1TB, and every file is billed for 90 days minimum.

Based on their calculations, if you plan on storing files for more 16 days, it will be marginally cheaper than S3, but if you plan on keeping files around longer than 90 days, it is ~5x cheaper than S3.

[ayushgta]

Interesting, in that case, it likely makes a wasabi a good choice for Arq (https://wasabi-support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1150015...)

[mxuribe]

I only recently learned of wasabi (I think it was Leo Laporte's Twit podcast)...and beyond the nicer price points, seems to be compatible with AWS...so, if i read things right, one could somewhat/more easily switch between aws and wasabi - avoiding the dreaded vendor lock. If that's true, that's pretty neat.

Disclaimer: i have no direct experience with wasabi, nor am i affiliated with them at all.

[icebraining]

The S3 api has become a bit of an informal standard. You can even host your own with something like Minio.

[aryamaan]

I am working on an android app as a side project and I have some 3 gb size of audio files to share with clients. I am exploring different storage services, any pointers to share regarding that?