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Comment by jaytaylor | Hacker News Reader

EDIT: My mistake, this is the new S3 pricing! NOT Glacier pricing! Thank you res0nat0r.

Am I understanding this right? $0.023/GB/month for Glacier, so * 12 months/year = $0.276/GB/year, which means:

    10GB  = $2.70/year
    100GB = $27.00/year
    1TB   = $270.00/year
    ...

And this is only the storage cost. This doesn't take into account the cost should you actually decise to retrieve the data.

So considering a 1TB hard drive [0] costs $50.00, how is this cost effective? I can buy 5x1TB hard drives for the price of 1TB on Glacier.

I understand there is overhead to managing it yourself. So, is this just not targeted to technically proficient folks?

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Cache-Desktop-Drive-WD10EZEX/dp/...

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The new glacier pricing is $0.004/GB/month, those prices above look to be the new S3 pricing. Also you get 99.999999999% durability.

S3 data is backed up in three geographically separated data-centers, so you need to budget for 3 copies.

It's a running service (rather than cold storage) which means you need servers, power network ports, etc. Again, times 3.

Finally, include the software development to build the server stack and the staff for 24x7 ops and security.

It's possible to beat their pricing but most people who actually do manage it by cutting in an area which they don't need.

That's comparing apples and oranges - your hard drive doesn't live in a secure, fireproof data center in the cloud you can access from anywhere.

Or eggs and omelettes...

I do miss my little 3 TB seagate that I rsync'ed from home to my office. That said, what if someone broke into our little office (encrypted backup of course)?

The reality though is that no business would be comfortable with the plan being "our data is replicated offsite at Steve's house". And, other than maybe a pair of NAS boxes (one at each end) the cheapness of the solution assumes you have a great network connection between the two, a machine to plug it into, and only need a single hard drive. That is, how would you do offsite, active backup of say 50 TB?

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and do offsite backup to GCS Nearline, that I'll move to Coldline when I get a minute to play with our new per-object lifecycle rules).

Where are you going to keep it? On site? Not so good for disaster recovery.

It's kind of funny when Feral hosting (I know I've been mentioning them a lot but trust me I'm in no way affiliated with them, I'm just satisfied customer, though they have trouble now with OVH) offers 2TB + 10Gbps unlimited bandwidth connection (it is unlimited, I abused it as much as I could with no warnings or anything) for 120 british pounds per year. That's good enough for me for mass storage of non-important data like Movies, Music, TV series, etc., that I convert then serve to users.

I Googled "Feral Hosting", clicked on the link to their web site [0], and was redirected to (presumably) their status page [1], which reads:

> tl;dr www.feralhosting.com is down, database lost, slots are up and will remain up. We're moving to the honour system for paying bills. ETA 25th November.

Not exactly a good first impression, to say the least.

[0]: https://www.feralhosting.com/

[1]: https://status.feral.io/

Living up to their name, I guess.

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