Ask HN: Storage pricing: GB or GiB | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Storage pricing: GB or GiB

4 pointsesher11 comments

I am designing a pricing page for our cloud hosting thing. DevOps suggested to use Gibibyte (GiB) instead of Gigabyte (GB) annotation. Binary calculation (GiB) is used under the hood (I believe). I think the actual difference is marginal.

But I wonder if we are doing anyone a favor by presenting it as GiB. Most hosting vendors use the classical metric annotation today:

- DigitalOcean: GiB - Google Cloud: GB - Vultr: GB - Hetzner: GB - AWS: GB - macOS: GB

I see this has been asked before in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13658889

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If you’re metering it, be consistent with your competition or places in adjacent markets.

The risk is you can look expensive to a casual observer if they don’t pay attention.

piocodollars per byte https://www.tarsnap.com/picoUSD-why.html if you want to scare all your non technical users.

Made me smile. That's interesting in this context: https://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html

With Gigabyte the difference is not so marginal anymore(7.4%). With Terabyte its already 10%

Thanks for pointing that out. I am not good at math.

I just copied it from wikipedia. The german version of the byte article has a table for this.

I see! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte#/media/File:Binaryvdecima...

Whatever you use, make sure it's clear what you mean: i.e. the `1GB = 1 billion bytes and 1TB = 1 trillion bytes` type footnote used on sales pages for products with a storage component.

Consider who the target audience is. Technical users will know (or should at least understand if you provide more details) GiB, but non technical users are much more likely to understand GB.

Pick your unit of measurement and use it everywhere.

GB is standard enough and specific enough at that large of a size and most people don't know what the hell a "gibibyte" is anyway.

I do a lot of work in this space and imo it’s better to use GiB notation since it’s a clear way to avoid any confusion.

You should be accurate - charging by one, but communicating pricing by the other is just a road towards conflict with your customer.

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