[tinco]

One of the main reasons that we're running our own hardware is because it's difficult and cost prohibitive for us to get our data to a cloud provider.

We're running a sort of sneakernet between our data collection agents and our data ingestion locations, each day each location receives 2-4 encrypted SSD's (Samsung T5) with up to 1TB of data. That then gets uploaded to our central location (overnight) for processing, and the next morning they're drained and ready for the next mission.

If Amazon had launched this earlier, and our cashflow (or funding :P) a bit better then maybe we'd have opted for running a constant stream of these snowcones to Amazon. Though processing costs are also a big concern, the cloud providers are at least twice as expensive as running metal, even when looking at 1 year paying for the hardware up front, and if you're cost sensitive when buying the hardware it could be 3-4 times cheaper than the managed cloud.

What I'd be afraid of with this server is losing them in the mail. I wonder if they've got a system where you could mirror two snowcones before you send one to them.