[19h]

That's pretty expensive.

Storing a 250GB backup = $1.

Sending to 2 machines 500GB - 250GB = $2.5.

Sending to 10 machines 2500GB - 250GB = $22.5.

How is storing this data so much cheaper than sending it? Especially given that it's stored redundantly?

I can't wrap my head around the fact that electrical signals are priced higher than equivalent HDDs.

Example, HGST 4TB MegaScale -- $60, or $13.46 per TB. Storing 4TB at 0.004 = $16. Transferring it 10 times would be $400.

Total $416, or $356 more than an actual physial hard disk.

Imagine getting a 4TB HDD, transferring the data to 10 computers and then throwing it away.

Being able to pay for excess egress is better at least than risking getting your contract killed by Wasabi if your egress exceeds your traffic.

[vitus]

One thing that stands out to me is an unintended consequence of the pricing structure:

Storing a 250GB backup and sending to 10 machines: $1 for storage, $22.5 for egress.

Storing a 250 GB backup, 2250GB of /dev/zero, and sending your backup to 10 machines: $10 for storage, $0 for egress.

[xyzzy123]

That's an interesting observation! Definitely creates weird incentives.

It seems incentives also depend on the nitty gritty details around how you are billed which are not defined very clearly. Granularity and timing, whether you pay for part months of storage etc.

However all games aside it does seem like if your own egress were free (or much cheaper than 0.01) it would be most efficient to send your data directly to where it needed to go, yourself.

Then you'd only be paying $1 for the backup.

[_v7gu]

Looks like someone forgot to put incentive compatibility constraints to their pricing optimization problem

[onionjake]

Interesting thought thread on our pricing structure... It saves money if you intend to send the backup to 10x places every month. If you only intend to do it once though you don't come out ahead $10 * 3=$30 versus $1 * 3+$22.50 = $25.50.

[vitus]

Good point -- the minimum 3-month storage duration eliminates this edge case for one-offs (since 3 * $0.4 > $1).

That said, it almost breaks even after the first month and pays off for itself a week into the second month. To eliminate this incentive, I'd suggest setting the cost of egress at (or below) the cost of storage.

It also would make more sense to me as a prospective customer that I'm not paying crazy overage fees, and I'm paying as if I reuploaded the same data and downloaded it an extra time.

[chrisshroba]

> I can't wrap my head around the fact that electrical signals are priced higher than equivalent HDDs.

I think this is standard with cloud storage. Check out this comparison [1], showing 2-6x higher costs for downloads versus monthly storage in B2, AWS, GCP, and Azure.

[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

[ddorian43]

> Sending that backup to 10 machines 2500GB - 250GB = $22.5.

They aren't doing 20x replication. They do 20+20? erasure coding, so the overhead is 2x or less.

> Being able to pay for excess egress is better at least than risking getting your contract killed by Wasabi if your egress exceeds your traffic.

You can upload dumb storage as needed in Wasabi. I assume you can do the same here.

[19h]

> They aren't doing 20x replication. They do 20+20? erasure coding, so the overhead is 2x or less.

With "sending that backup to 10 machines" I meant "egress 10x of 250GB" = 2500GB. With a pricing of $0.01 per GB after egress tops 100% of stored data, or 250GB, that's 0.01 * 2250 = $22.5. I'm not talking about replication overhead on their side.