Re:Show HN: Cloud Storage with ZFS send and receive over SSH
by rsync on Wednesday July 29, 2015 @02:21PM
(#9970538)
Thanks for asking - I like having the chance to sketch out our value.
First, glacier and nearline are not online storage. They are not random access datastores that you can interact with in real time with arbitrary applications. There's not a comparison to be made there.
I think the proper comparison is with Amazon S3 and I hope you'll allow me to approximate their pricing, on average, to 4-5 cents per GB, per month. The headline price for storage, of course, is ~3 cents, but you are charged for all outbound data as well as certain IO operations. I think 4-5 cents is a decent approximation.
So ...
If you're just walking in off the street and getting a small quantity of rsync.net storage, yes, it is 4-5x the price of S3 and you are paying that premium for UNIX-native storage and a phone number / email address that connects you to a real engineer (sometimes me, actually). Given that, at these smaller quantities, you're paying $10 or $20 per month, I think that's a very, very high value for the money.
If you're using larger amounts of storage, the pricing gets down to ~6 cents per GB (assuming annual discount) or even 3 cents per GB at petabyte levels. So at 10+ TB quantities we are just barely more expensive than S3 and at petabyte quantities we are decidedly cheaper.[1]
As always, if you're a small end user, email us about the HN discount which is quite substantial.
[1] Actually, it's even more competitive relative to S3 since, by default, all accounts have 7 daily ZFS snapshots enabled and 1+ TB accounts have 7 daily + 4 weekly. Those typically add between 20-40% space usage on our end, but you don't pay for that ... on S3 you would indeed pay for that retention and you'd have to roll your own snapshot/retention script/logic. At rsync.net, Apple-style "time machine" snapshots are "just there".
First, glacier and nearline are not online storage. They are not random access datastores that you can interact with in real time with arbitrary applications. There's not a comparison to be made there.
I think the proper comparison is with Amazon S3 and I hope you'll allow me to approximate their pricing, on average, to 4-5 cents per GB, per month. The headline price for storage, of course, is ~3 cents, but you are charged for all outbound data as well as certain IO operations. I think 4-5 cents is a decent approximation.
So ...
If you're just walking in off the street and getting a small quantity of rsync.net storage, yes, it is 4-5x the price of S3 and you are paying that premium for UNIX-native storage and a phone number / email address that connects you to a real engineer (sometimes me, actually). Given that, at these smaller quantities, you're paying $10 or $20 per month, I think that's a very, very high value for the money.
If you're using larger amounts of storage, the pricing gets down to ~6 cents per GB (assuming annual discount) or even 3 cents per GB at petabyte levels. So at 10+ TB quantities we are just barely more expensive than S3 and at petabyte quantities we are decidedly cheaper.[1]
As always, if you're a small end user, email us about the HN discount which is quite substantial.
[1] Actually, it's even more competitive relative to S3 since, by default, all accounts have 7 daily ZFS snapshots enabled and 1+ TB accounts have 7 daily + 4 weekly. Those typically add between 20-40% space usage on our end, but you don't pay for that ... on S3 you would indeed pay for that retention and you'd have to roll your own snapshot/retention script/logic. At rsync.net, Apple-style "time machine" snapshots are "just there".