Paying for Cloud Storage is Stupid [video] | Hacker News Reader

Paying for Cloud Storage is Stupid [video]

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I agree with the notion that cloud storage (Google drive, one drive, Dropbox) are simply too costly to use as your archive for photos and videos. UHD video on my phone takes up around 700 MB per minute. A single photo is around 5 MB. In about 3-4 years of normal usage you will blow past the 2 TB max that these services offer.

Then what will you do? Pay even more? It's an endless thing. It's not sustainable if you care about money at all. What you need is a combo of local storage (4 TB drives in RAID) and have a full archive backup in glacier or something.

Costs will be in check, and best of all no recurring cost just to keep your data saved. And you still have a proper backup if need arises.

So you will not have recurring costs hosting your own system? No hard drive replacements, upgrades, board replacements, wholesale technology upgrades when different networking or security protocols come along, capacity upgrades, and your time and energy? For most people, paying a small amount per year to place this burden on someone else is money well spent.

I'm assuming that you already have part of the infrastructure at home for other purposes (a network, a gaming PC, a media server, etc.). All that can also utilise the same NAS.

I guess if you feel paying for terabytes of Google drive is not much of an expense more power to you. It's certainly fire and forget. I find it too expensive, and irritating to keep paying for all the historical data I've generated. When my RAID is about to reach capacity, I buy a couple of 4 TB drives and that's it. No subscription to worry about.

Paying for Cloud storage lets you: - Not have to deal with all the hassle that he had to deal with in this video - Not spend all this time installing, debugging and maintaining this config - Have redondancy in multiple data centers reducing considerably your risk of hardware failure

If you want a cheaper option than Google drive, maybe look for cold storage? Or s3 buckets which will probably cost much less than his hardware alone

I stuck a small amount of money into a separate checking account, pointed my AWS account to it, and now I'm fairly sure my static website in s3 will outlive my grandkids.

A personal account? I think any bank account has to be closed out in the process of processing an estate.

Not if you don't tell anyone about it. I think the bigger worry would be if it was declared abandoned property due to inactivity, but if you are making occasional withdrawals that might be OK.

You're right. This should be in my will.

How do you handle domain name renewal limits?

I'm not aware of limits, but auto renew is set on all my domains, for the same checking account.

There are probably many flaws with my statement about generational static websites, but from a "cloud storage" perspective like TFA, I'm saying it's cheap as free.

Yeah, I think it’s a cool and important thing to pursue! Just wondering where the land mines are. Did you happen to make a list of considerations while you were doing it?

Actually no. My intent was not to keep my site up past my grandkids lives, merely to show that a small amount of money could manage that (if that money was itself managed for that purpose). But it sure seems like that's a fun project.

I wonder what it'd take:

- An llc/ trust with enough ownership over the contents to host them

- A statement in my will that certain domains and accounts should be signed over to them

- Some executor who is tech savvy enough (probably at the LLC / Trust / Entity) to actually transfer domains, content, and set up hosting.

Given all this, it might be $5000 to host a site for 100 years, assuming $1/m ($1200) actual costs, and $20/y ($2k) domain costs, and a little extra for the execution bit.

We've basically built the wayback machine / internet archive, except with opt-in hosting at the original domain (only the ip changes, I presume).

Make sure you don’t get DDoS’d

DDoS'ing a cloud front+s3-backed html file sounds so difficult as to be impossible.

But again, I am not sure that's correct. Now as for paying the cost for egress, I'm betting they could drain my account if they wanted.

Yes, that's what I meant

IIRC LTT suffered a data loss incident on a storage cluster, and they rely on big-ass RAID clusters which are known for the long recovery times.

These tradeoffs may be fine for a Youtube channel, but are completely unacceptable for any other business, and it could have other consequences, such as fines if they are unable to pull up compliance records mandated by law.

They can simply negotiate with other cheaper providers such as Backblaze and Wasabi.

ZFS misconfiguration IIRC. My understanding is that they are knowingly keeping the raw project files of finished projects on a relatively weak setup because they don't believe the data to be important and don't want to pay a lot to keep it. Actually important data is likely handled with a bit more care.

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