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Comment by t0mas88 | Hacker News Reader

The speed is questionable in many countries where consumer internet connections already have 500mbit upload speed. But in the US I think bandwidth can be quite limited if you're not in a major city with fiber.

The other big part is pricing. AWS charges $ 0.09 per GB for outbound transfer, so getting 8 TB of data out of AWS via the internet costs over $ 700. Doing it through Snowcone costs around $ 300 + shipping.

Reasonable use-case would be transferring video material or high resolution sensor data.

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It never ceases to amaze me that people pay that much for transfer. It's one tenth the price on DigitalOcean and it isn't like this is comparing two different types of things.

DO is incredibly limited in terms of products compared to AWS.

Yes but this is just data storage. I get it if you need to be on network, yadda, yadda, but so many people just senselessly use S3 and rack up bills that are easily avoidable.

Digital Ocean Spaces doesn't have the same durability designs of S3. Or performance in terms of TPS. It's not apples to apples.

DO is great for small personal projects, but, I wouldn't run a fortune 500 company on it.

What does that have to do with the price of bandwidth?

If you have data that you're unlikely to need to access (i.e. backups), not many providers can compete with Deep Archive storage pricing.

4TB on S3 Deep Archive: $3.96/mo to store, $360 to restore and download over the internet 4TB on B2: $20/mo to store, $40 to download 4TB on Digital Ocean: $80/mo to store, $30 to download

Yes, it feels almost extortionary to have to pay that much to get your data out of AWS. But depending how long you store data for, it can end up being the cheaper option: you're just gambling on how likely you are to actually need to download it.

Can you transfer data out of AWS with Snowcone? I thought it was all transfer in, which is free.

A screenshot in the article implies that you "Export from S3" https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2020/snow_job_type_...

You can transfer out, but you pay the similarly insane egress costs. Somewhat cheaper, but still bonkers.

Snowball/snowcone, US East

$0.03 per GB ~-> $300 per 10TB

If you're buying disks at scale that's almost the cost of the disk.

Network egress

$0.15 per GB

$0.08 per GB (>150TB/month)

It makes sense for the occassional transfer so you're not paying for expensive EBS storage for stuff you don't need cloud access to.

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