[klodolph]

> So do the calculations?

Is this some kind of personal challenge? It’s arithmetic for chrissakes, not calculus. S3 IA $0.0125/Gb-mo, ingress basically free, $99/yr÷(12mo/yr×$0.0125/Gb-mo)=660 Gb. Reasonable to ignore egress for backups—you may want to account for it, but it’s reasonable to ignore it. Do your own calculations if you have different assumptions.

That’s not hard. The numbers don’t have to be exact.

Maybe I just think it’s easy because I’ve run numbers like these for a living. Given X different storage configurations, under which conditions is configuration 1 cheaper than configurations 2 and 3?

> That's how many businesses work. Many low end gym chains operate on the assumption that most users won't use their services. There's no way that planet fitness can equip and operate a gym for $10/month per member, if everyone one of them went regularly. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to get a planet fitness membership (assuming you'd actually go), or that they're at risk of going under.

The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move my data to a different provider, depending on how much data and what kind of rate limits. We’ve seen this before. People with data stuck in an “unlimited” storage service that’s shutting down, trying to transfer it but getting their egress throttled.

The economics of gyms are different because the cost is not only the membership, but also the time it takes you to get to the gym. Cloud services are a much more efficient market, which means the margins are much lower.

[gruez]

>Is this some kind of personal challenge? It’s arithmetic for chrissakes, not calculus. S3 IA $0.0125/Gb-mo, ingress basically free, $99/yr÷(12mo/yr×$0.0125/Gb-mo)=660 Gb.

This includes AWS's margin, which could be quite handsome. Bandwidth costs for the top 3 hyperscalers have converged to around 9 cents per GB, but nobody seriously thinks that's anywhere close to to the actual cost of bandwidth, or that hetzner/ovh is going to go under because they're offering 1TB ($90) of bandwdith for their $5/month VPS.

Even taking the 660GB figure at face value, that's plausibly within the range of what I'd expect the average person to have backed up, especially when you consider that the pricing is per machine, and the standard desktop/laptop comes with around 500 GB of storage.

You've also failed to address my point about their gross margins. The reliability of their books have been questioned, but even the short report didn't accuse them of cooking that metric.

>The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move my data to a different provider, depending on how much data and what kind of rate limits. We’ve seen this before. People with data stuck in an “unlimited” storage service that’s shutting down, trying to transfer it but getting their egress throttled.

It's a backup service. It's not even trying to compare itself with the likes of dropbox or onedrive. You should have at the very least a second copy locally.

[klodolph]

> This includes AWS's margin, which could be quite handsome.

It could not be.

Storage costs are more or less race to the bottom. Storage business model is that it’s cheap and commodified, but sticky. Your data is stuck in S3 because it’s a pain in the ass to migrate. The margins come from non-commodified parts of the cloud (higher-level SaaS products) and I suspect egress costs (I don’t have the details).

There’s three parts to my understanding here. One part is my understanding of the business model, which explains why storage is a race to the bottom, why it’s not subsidized (or not subsidized much), why from a strategic perspective, the margins are getting eliminated. The second part to my understanding is the technical aspect—the calculations for how much it costs to stick hard drives in a data center and run storage systems on top with the desired accessibility and reliability, and I have some fairly deep expertise in parts of this. The last part is my personal experience working for cloud providers.

I can elaborate on the first two parts but for obvious reasons some of my knowledge is proprietary and I can’t share it.

> Bandwidth costs for the top 3 hyperscalers have converged to around 9 cents per GB, but nobody seriously thinks that's anywhere close to to the actual cost of bandwidth, or that hetzner/ovh is going to go under because they're offering 1TB ($90) of bandwdith for their $5/month VPS.

Bandwidth is not commodified like storage. I know that storage cost is close to operational cost because I’ve done extensive calculations and comparisons—and some projects are cheap enough that you have to revisit your theories about how they work on a technical level.

I don’t know why bandwidth is expensive. I’m not an expert on bandwidth or CPU or 90% of the other stuff. I only happen to have expertise on storage.

There are services you can buy where egress is the major cost and egress is significantly cheaper than egress from AWS, GCP, or Azure. Either egress is a complicated product or the margins are high. Probably some combination. Storage is less complicated and the margins are lower.

> You've also failed to address my point about their gross margins. The reliability of their books have been questioned, but even the short report didn't accuse them of cooking that metric.

I guess I don’t understand what point you’re making, or how that point about gross margins makes sense. It doesn’t make sense to me so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to respond to.