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Comment by 0xCMP | Hacker News Reader

As someone with TBs of SSDs and HDDs laying around I am someone who agrees with your point, but this is not a good way to compare costs.

For one, this has no redundancy and doesn't factor the cost of the machine providing the storage. But also it's an upfront cost for storing 4TB. It would be implied you wouldn't literally store 4TB on the SSD because now you're out of capacity for more data. If you only have 2GB of data in a bucket then S3 is still magnitudes cheaper, faster, and more redundant than anything you could put together yourself because the cost is spread across all the users of the service.

Reality is there are so many times that S3 makes the most sense that it makes people short-circuit and always pick S3 despite the huge hidden IOPS and bandwidth costs everyone rightfully tries to point out.

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If you have only 2GB of data it's trivial, it hardly matters how you store it. You might as well hold a full copy in RAM on each server and synchronize it with your developer laptop every half hour in case they all go offline at once, for all it matters.

To reliably hold a bit over 2GB of data in RAM on AWS, you'll probably need something like a t4g.medium, about $0.0336/hr on-demand. 730 hours in a month, so $24.528, but ideally you'll have like three or so instances so like $74/mo. That's before thinking about stuff like IP address costs, the EBS volumes underpinning those boxes, etc. And then managing all the syncing and what not.

Of course, that's list prices, you can get savings plans and RIs and discounts.

The cost of RAM per hour in AWS isn't cheap.

Once again proving that AWS is expensive any way you slice it. Even in today's RAM crisis, an extra 2GB is what, $50? and you probably already have 2GB free since they don't make RAM modules that small.

Just buying a few sticks of RAM isn't hosting data in that RAM indefinitely. Its not the same as what S3 (or similar services) gets you.

What is your datacenter costs for multiple different buildings (assuming colocation/office space)? How much are you going to pay for the electricity? How much are you paying for networking? How much is rent for each U of server? How much do you spend on payroll to have knowledgeable people to manage it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Suddenly its not just a one-time $50 payment.

Maybe you don't actually need all of that, just some slices of some of that whole stack of things. Probably true in many situations. But just looking at it as a couple of sticks of RAM is not a like-for-like comparison.

I'm not arguing the cloud is cheap. You can definitely go cheaper and choose your own cost optimizations when managing the hardware yourself, deciding what is actually a necessary cost and what isn't. I totally agree AWS overchages for a lot of what they do; they price their stuff at a premium because they know businesses will pay it. But hosting 2GB of stuff in RAM reliably and indefinitely to anywhere near the guarantees of S3 is going to be a lot more than just a single $50 payment.

Your server probably already has 2GB free RAM

Server? What server? Suddenly now I need to also buy a server? Sounds like quite a bit more than $50!

Things always seem free when you've already spent the money. It doesn't change the fact you spent quite a bit of money, you're just failing to account for it properly.

The standard here was I've just got 2GB of data I need to reliably store someplace. Its an assumption I've got multiple servers in multiple physically separate buildings already lying around.

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