Hetzner Storage Share and Storage Box: Data storage and management made easy
hetzner.com
hetzner.com
My work place have been on the previous storage box BX40 for 2TBs of off-site storage for 4 years. This announced update to the service, shows that BX21 service has just upgraded our offsite backup to 5TBs and no difference to the monthly price we already pay!
Here's the relevant bits on the website:
Storage box: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
Storage share: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
They're even cheaper than the local VPS provider that i currently use for most of my hosting, which also had a storage offering: https://www.time4vps.com/storage-vps/ (no affiliate link because they're losing out at this point)
Not only that, but Hetzner's VPSes (adjacent to their storage offerings) are billed based on the time used (no monthly commitments; just like Scaleway and many other modern hosts allow you the flexibility to spin something up for an hour if need be) and also have somehow managed to keep their prices low enough to beat almost all of the platforms that i know of out there for similar specs: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Scaleway, not even talking about the giants like Azure, AWS or GCP.
So, anyone know of other products that can compete with what they're offering?
One of the other cheap ones that i can think of is Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/storage-vps/ But Hetzner still seems better in comparison, apart from Contabo's VPS deals which blow everything else out of the water specs wise. Note: Contabo's UI is antiquated, there are setup fees and some have complained about the real world performance being underwhelming, possibly due to overselling.
For longer term storage, AWS Glacier also didn't seem half bad, though that's not an apples to apples comparison due to a different use case: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=4
Either way, it's nice that there are options like that out there, allowing people to have off site backups on the cheap, or even just host their own VPSes and whatnot for affordable prices.
(Preferably, an open source one, and preferably using “storage box”, not “storage share” since Nextcloud routinely has CVE’s)
Have there been any updates from Cloudflare about when they expect R2 to reach GA?
This is a product targeted for sysadmins, who are familiar with ftp(s), sftp/scp, rsync, webdav... or at least one of those. The day S3 protocol becomes useful for interop with other software, storage vendors like hetzner will probably adopt it.
Is there anything good/special about S3 protocol that would make it worth supporting? I don't know, but in the present time when i see some tool claiming S3-compatibility i always wonder why? Why make it easier for Amazon and other clown computing providers (spot the typo) to continue eating away selfhosting as a practice, and whatever's left of online digital rights along with it? I'd rather let/help their proprietary mainframe and protocols die, but i may be missing something.
You don't even need to support the full API for this purpose as a very common use case is just uploading files for backups.
No one is arguing for S3 to become the one new standard, it is more like supporting the most common import/export file type in Photoshop/Blender.
If you have existing running processes in place and all you need to update is connection string and auth to save a ton of money then you are much more likely to do so.
I understand the rationale, but Photoshop/Blender files are very common in their respective space. In comparison, the proportion of people using S3 protocol vs NFS/FTP/SFTP is insignificant (i don't have stats).
> If you have existing running processes in place and all you need to update is connection string and auth to save a ton of money then you are much more likely to do so.
Good point! But do companies using cloud storage really want to save on costs? If they did, there were already much cheaper storage solutions long before Amazon S3 existed so why go with S3 in the first place? Amazon's pricing is confusing for storage costs, but for sure 0.09$/GB egress is a much higher cost than most providers (90$/TB ?! that's very much the price of an entire 1TB hard drive!).
Amazon "cloud" is just vendor lock-in and i'm personally a little uneasy to encourage anyone to support their tooling because who's gonna benefit from that apart from Amazon? Certainly not the hundreds of maintainers who'll have to spend countless hours to implement/maintain these new protocols who from my understanding don't bring any new useful feature.