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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its essentially free. Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it, and at an ever-spiraling decreasing price.

It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.

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Where does this meme of "storage is essentially free" come from? A 4TB drive is already like ~$100 and that's without any fault tolerance. Now purchase some for yourself, geo-replicate it across the world, make it be online 24/7 and accessible with high speed worldwide, and tell me how it came out to be "essentially free"?

Marginal cost. You don't build one network per drive.

I wouldn't personally say "essentially free" though.

The network was hardly the culprit in my explanation. How much is the cost of 4TB of georeplicated storage do you think? Surely you have to at least pay for the storage itself? So like $300-$400 at least if it's replicated 3-4x? And I haven't even hinted at offline backups and all kinds of other things.

That sounds deliberately dense. Understand what marginal cost is. A megabyte of storage used to cost $1000. Today it costs $400 / 1,000,000.

To store a photo is not a penny. Its some percents of a penny. You wouldn't bend over to pick it up on the street.

> To store a photo is not a penny. Its some percents of a penny. You wouldn't bend over to pick it up on the street.

You're storing 1 photo (like 3MB)?? Or like thousands/millions?

Give me an estimate for how much you think 4TB of replicated storage costs if you think I overestimated?

For Google? A small fraction of what you guessed, in bulk.

Marginal cost is meaningless when you are dealing with exponential values. There are four trillion photos on Google Photos currently. That number is increasing faster than the cost of drives is going down.

<citation>?

Storage is growing faster. That's my point.

I did not mean the network as the internet network, but as the whole replicated system including almost all the different layers.

>Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its essentially free. Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it, and at an ever-spiraling decreasing price.

And yet I can't find a cheap host for 2-4TB that's not like $10/month or so... even with Glacier it's $16/4TB/month...

KS-3 Server - Atom N2800 - 4GB DDR3 1066 MHz - 2TB SATA $9.99/month

https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/order/kimsufi.xml?reference=18...

No RAID, but it's in your desired price range.

Yep, it's possible with a dedicated or vps with 4TB or more, but this doesn't suit my use case (backup).

I want the storage replicated geo-redunduntly backed-up and safer, Glacier/Backblaze/etc-style, not just lost whenever someone breaks into the server or there's a hardware issue at the hosting company, etc. Basically "upload and forget"...

Same way, I can't find any good Squarespace/Ghost/Wordpress.com style service where I can run 3-4 sites that's not like $10/month per site or so...

I'd appreciate a service that charges you based on actual traffic load, not mere website count/custom domain, and that is "post content and forget".

Maybe https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info ?

Supposedly $5.99/TB/Month

Something like that functionality-wise, but it's still more than Glacier ($16 vs $22 for ~4TB).

No egress charges, so it's cheaper than Glacier for some use cases.

That's true. I want more of a "store and very rarely retrieve" however, and there's no sub-$10/month service for 2-3TB yet.

Are there any options like these with redundancy built into the storage?

Maybe close to free on a per bit basis but I guess electricity, bandwidth, redundancy etc aren't. Photos is one of the products I'm actually happy to pay for extra storage. €100 buys my 2TB of storage that I can share with my wife and my kids when they are old enough. Knowing that any pic I snap is backed up is worth the cost, photographs are one of the few things that are truly irreplaceable. Saying that based on advice from other threads I'll be doing a regular download from takeout.google.xom

Yeah they're nearly free too. For a photo, some invisible fraction of a penny per year.

We're being marketed storage by features, not by the cost of the thing. And in an efficient market in a sane world, that should drop to nearly free.

Those data centres just build themselves, right?

One data center for 1B people? Yes, per person.

Folks, try to understand marginal cost. Its a tiny number per person now, and plummeting.

> Folks, try to understand marginal cost.

'Marginal cost' doesn't work like you think it does.

Marginal cost means the cost for adding one new user. But they aren't paying to add one new user. They're paying for all users.

If each user's storage cost 1 dollar a month then yeah adding an individual new user is basically free. But if they're supporting 100 million users then it's a hundred million dollars a month. Which isn't free.

If you still don't quite get it - try this thought experiment. If storage is free then could you afford to set up a storage data centre? If not, why not? It's free after all, in your mind.

They're not charging a dollar. That's my point. They're raising their prices, while storage costs fall.

Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. That's actually in the site guidlines.

> Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation.

I agreee! I think my argument is the most charitable. 'It costs money to store things. They're asking you to pay for it'. Seems most charitable, reasonable, and simplest explanation.

Your interpretation is 'each byte costs nothing so a hundred million dollar data centre also costs nothing' which is an uncharitable interpretation of what they're doing.

At the end of the day 'storing a billion photos is free' - your argument - is simply a provably false statement, as everyone in these threads keeps trying to explain to you.

Hey you're deliberately ignoring the cost per person, and the fact that raising prices while storage costs are falling dramatically is fiscally backward.

That extremely uncharitable view of 'free' is getting in the way of understanding. So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. At a billion people served, its 10 cents per person per lifetime. So why $10 per month?

Get it now?

> So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once.

In your mind, who pays for the hundred million dollar data centre?

Like I just said, the folks who use it. At 10 cents per person, that would about cover it. What's the question?

Anyway I've said all I have to say. Read my comments again if you want to understand. I'm out.

> Like I just said, the folks who use it. At 10 cents per person, that would about cover it. What's the question?

You repeatedly said 'Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its [sic] essentially free.'

Now you're saying you agree actually it requires hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and so people should be charged for it.

> Read my comments again if you want to understand.

But see how your comments contradict yourself? It should be free but people should pay for it. Which is it?

>> essentially free

Well Google is going to charge you $240 annually for a TB of storage now.

Where? I see $10 a month or $100 a year prepaid for 2 TB: https://one.google.com/u/1/storage

It's a proxy for usage that fairly non-technical consumers can understand.

> It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.

Or like charging for time or distance travelled, when the 'real cost' is fuel?

>Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it

Maybe, though I'm not sure it's without breaking a sweat. Also, someone is most definitely footing some rather large bills.

According to this blog post[0] the amount of data uploaded each day is over 4 petabytes. For Drive, Photos and Docs only, i.e. it doesn't even include YouTube.

[0]https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

The price of storage is the price of maintenance not of storing.

Which, since its largely automated, is also essentially free.

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