Does Amazon S3 really save money?
Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225
With a price tag of $0.150/GB/month, storing 1TB of data costs around $150/month on Amazon S3. But this is a recurring amount. So, for the same amount of data it would cost $1800/year and $3600/2-years. And this doesn’t even include the data transfer costs.
Consider the alternative, with colocation the hardware cost of storing 1TB of data on two machines (for redundancy) would be around $1500/year. But this is fixed. And increasing the storage capacity on each machine can be done at the price of $0.1/GB. Which means that a RAID-1+redundant copies of data on multiple servers for 4TB of data could be achieved at $3000/year and $6000/2-years in a colocation facility. Whereas on S3 the same would cost $7200/year and $14,400/2-years.
Also, adding bandwidth+power+h/w replacement costs at a colocation facility would still keep the costs significantly lower than Amazon S3.
Given this math, what is the rationale behind going with Amazon S3? The Smugmug case study of 600TB of data stored on S3 seems misleading.
I do see several services that offer unlimited storage which is actually hosted on S3. For example, Smugmug, Carbonite etc. all offer unlimited storage for a fixed annual fee. Wouldn’t this send the costs out of the roof on Amazon S3?
If your startup is using Amazon S3 for its storage needs, for the benefit of the startup community, can you please elaborate your rationale for choosing this service?
