Comment by Nexxxeh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nexxxeh | Hacker News Reader

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The post is a useful cautionary tale, and he's not alone in getting burned by Glacier pricing. Unfortunately it was OP not reading the docs properly.

Yes, the docs are imperfect (and were likely worse back in the day). And it was compounded by the bug, apparently. But it's what everyone on HN has learned in one way or another... RTFM.

Was it mentioned in the article that the retrieval pricing is spread over four hours, and you can request partial chunks of a file? Heck, you can retrieve always all your data from Glacier for free if you're willing to wait long enough.

And if it's a LOT of data, you can even pay and they'll ship it on a hardware storage device (Amazon Snowball).

Anyone can screw up, I'm sure we all have done, goodness knows I have. But at the very least, pay attention to the pricing section, especially if it links to an FAQ.

I would say the FM in this case was unreadable. “starting at $0.011 per gigabyte”, "learn more" - no one would expect to pay $150 here.

It's definitely sleazy of Amazon to hide the pricing info like that, but I can't imagine seeing that sentence while making a purchase and not clicking through to see how the pricing actually works. But I guess that's just me.

Not just you. But read the page referred by that "Learn more" link. It's very unclear. I mean, or course, it has unambiguous meaning. But to understand it you need to read a lengthy sheet of prose, and only deep in it, after many definitions, you must notice a phrase "we multiply your peak hourly billable retrieval rate" ... "by the number of hours in a month". What concentration of attention, and how much time a reader need to spend, to understand this important nuance?

As far as I see, in all other places they specify their pricing "per GB", and only this small phrase uncovers real meaning, which is not per actual GBs you transferred, but your peak rate multiplied by number of hours in month. IMHO this should be one of the first phrases describing the pricing model.

>Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more.

If you want more than 5% of your data in a month, the minimum it will cost you is $0.011 per gigabyte. Click here to see how to work out how much it will cost.

It's certainly not unreadable, although to be fair, it's nowhere near as clear as it should be.

It's not unreadable, but is designed to make it difficult to realize that typical usage might result in very significant costs.

'Use Amazon Glacier, it costs about a cent!' is the essential pitch.

I don't think he really was "burned".

Paying 87c a month for a couple of years, then 52c a month for a few more years, to back up 60+GB, and then getting a one off fee of $150 still averages out at around $2/mo. Hardly getting shafted.

Depends on your budget. If you don't have $150 disposable income to blow on a screwup, it's an expensive mistake.

It's like getting a parking ticket for parking somewhere you've unknowingly been parking illegally for years. Yeah, if you average it out, it's cheap. But having to stump up the cash still hurts.

60Gig is what - maybe 200 CDs losslessly compressed? That's a couple of grand's worth of disposable income he entrusted to Amazon and his own management skills (assuming he no longer has access to the original disks to re-rip them (and ignoring the copyright implications of that)).

I guess he always had Linus's backup strategy open to him - "Only wimps use music backups: real men just upload their important tunes on Bittorrent, and let the rest of the world seed it ;)"

Meta, Response to sub-comments[meta enough yet?]: Ah, that makes way more sense. Sorry for labelling the parent a troll. This was clearly my mistaken interpretation. It was weird. As I tried to check out the math on the parent's assertions, they came out an order of magnitude too high like 3 times in a row. So I concluded that the parent was intentionally inflating the relevant costs to misdirect the discussion. However, it was really just my failure to consider the perspective of the parent, aligned with a loose enough situation that the mistake was possible. Again, I apologize for the misapplied label. I'll leave the original comment below so as not to rewrite history on how I was (due to sincere misunderstanding, I maintain) kind of a jerk :/

A couple grand? 500GB hdds have been less than $100 for a long time now, certainly since before Amazon Glacier was a product.

Just because you can formulate a large valuation for something doesn't mean that it's a reasonable valuation.

Even $10/cd is a ridiculous estimate of the cost of blank CDs. If you insisted on using blank CDs for backup, you could do 200 CDs for $40.

Edit: And what are CDs... 640mb? that's like 12 CDs, not 200... I'm realizing that I've fallen into a troll trap...

Meta: I guess I'll leave this comment up as a cautionary tale.

Just in case you are confused, the person above you is talking about the cost of the music ON the CD, not the CD itself.

Indeed. I'm guessing 200-ish albums, purchased at ~$10 each, would take up 60G when losslessly compressed. (As pointed out, 640MB/disk would mean just under 100 "full" audio CDs as bit for bit copies, so 200 is probably a quite low estimate).

I bought my ~3000 disc CD collection here in Australia, many of them still have price stickers of $30 and more on them. While CDs were "a thing" here, I figure I spent about a quarter of a cheap house on them. (I don't regret a cent though. I'm also "that guy" who thinks "You only had 60Gig of music to back up? Wow!", but is mostly socially-aware enough to keep that sort of reaction to himself.)

FWIW, no offence taken, an understandable mistake to make given my lack of clarity.

> If you insisted on using blank CDs for backup, you could do 200 CDs for $40.

Wouldn't 2 x 100GB Blu-ray discs be better for the same price? Less physical storage space required and less time to burn the data.

That's definitely a valid counterpoint, agreed.

Like you said, a good cautionary tale. Even this incident, although definitely rough, isn't that bad compared to what can happen if you scale a full infrastructure improperly, or just overlook something involving a software-based business. Just a couple of months ago, a test EC2 instance that had been forgotten about got spun up by a very archaic piece of code, and ended up costing the guys I'm working with quite a bit. Always RTFM (especially AWS pricing docs) carefully, or feel the burn.

Snowball can only import data, not export it. Here is the footnote on the Snowball page:

Snowball currently supports importing data to AWS. Exporting data out of AWS will be supported in a future release.

Even after people have RTFM, many are still misunderstanding the pricing model. For instance, people now think you can store 2TB of data and download 100GB of it at once (5%) for free. Nope! You can request a max of 0.16% per day of data for free. Once you exceed 0.16% of your data in any given day, you start getting charged. I think it's fair to say that even with the intent to RTFM, the pricing model is unusually strange and AWS should really put more effort into explaining it.

> The post is a useful cautionary tale, and he's not alone in getting burned by Glacier pricing. Unfortunately it was OP not reading the docs properly.

Well, it was that and also the docs being knowingly and deliberately set up to trick incautious readers. The user does have a responsibility to read the fine print, but that doesn't excuse Amazon being openly evil about it. This is no different than ISPs that advertise "up to 50Mb/s" when they know very well that their network won't deliver more than 5.

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