Cloud Storage - Change my mind.

Nate812

AWS S3: Store 2TB? $8.192 USD per month. Want to restore 2TB? $182 USD.

GCE: Store 2TB? $40.96 USD per month. Want to restore 2TB? $163.84 USD.

Wasabi: Store 2TB? $12 USD per month. Want to restore 2TB? $0 USD.

B2: Store 2TB? $10.24 USD per month. Want to restore 2TB? $20.48 USD.

The only reasonable options I see are B2, Wasabi. Change my mind?

KuJoe

I just started backing up to Backblaze's B2 this morning and so far it has been a much better experience than AWS S3/Glacier.

"Cloud" providers I currently use:
Amazon Drive: $59.99/Year for 1TB
Google One: $99.99/Year for 2TB
Synology C2: €59.99/Year for 1TB
Backblaze B2: $?/Month for ?GB (still waiting for the backup to finish to see pricing and amount)

Nate812

@NiPlex

Name shamed.

solaire

For non-cold storage, B2 is definitely cheapest, next to Wasabi. Downloading with Backblaze comes at a cost (though this is no different than say Amazon S3). Wasabi comes with free traffic so might potentially be cheaper if you do some traffic as you pointed out. There really is nothing else that comes close.

deank

@Nate812 said:
@NiPlexx

Name shamed.

Well done, you've done us proud. Those scammers can suck a turtle's dick.

cnbeining

Nate812 said: B2: Store 2TB? $10.24 USD per month. Want to restore 2TB? $20.48 USD.

Note you can put a quick CloudFlare reverse proxy in front of the https://f00x.backblazeb2.com and eliminate the traffic cost.

Neoon

@Nate812 said:
@NiPlex

Name shamed.

Well sending spam to sell shit via private mail, is against the rules.
May the ban hammer be with you, amen.

desperand

Nate812 said: Wasabi: Store 2TB? $12 USD per month. Want to restore 2TB? $0 USD.

Open their documentation about the pricing. You can't use it for per month basis, only annually to get such prices. That means they store and charge you for a minimum of 3 months for any of the uploaded files to cloudstorage. This is a tricky thing to display from their side $5 /TB while it's not really like that. If you need to use them for a long time, maybe it will be like that, if you planning to use them just to move your data across different cloud storages you will charge for 3x price (15$ instead of 5$). Plus you can't download more than you uploaded. If you will try to download more than you uploaded - they will change their pricing for you too (by increasing and calculating new fees).

This is why I stop using wasabi, because it's not cheap at all.

Nate812 said: B2: Store 2TB? $10.24 USD per month. Want to restore 2TB? $20.48 USD.

No too. Not $20.48 USD, more, around 40 or like that.

Their buckets what you prepare to download calculated as a storage price too, while all that they do is zip stream. In other words, you will pay 30$.. + some extra things...

Also, you can try to use any 3rd party tool to get your data from them, but it's not 20$ like they write on their site too, it's around 25$ (tested several times). I do not remember why it happens.

But both wasabi and b2 not really good providers for a large amount of data. > 1-2TB
if you need upload/download them frequently. Much cheaper will be something like sync.com with 3TB for 10 euro/mo, or any VPS with 1TB storage with a price tag below 10$.

servarica_hani

Can I ask question

Why you would prefer cloud storage using an API than normal VPS with huge storage ?

For example we offer VPS with 2TB Storage and unlimited 100mbps traffic for 10$/month.

Do you think that managing the vps that the storage is attached to is too much headache ?

I am asking to understand what the users are looking for and adapt our offerings int he future

Thanks

akhfa

@Hani said:
Can I ask question

Why you would prefer cloud storage using an API than normal VPS with huge storage ?

For example we offer VPS with 2TB Storage and unlimited 100mbps traffic for 10$/month.

Do you think that managing the vps that the storage is attached to is too much headache ?

I am asking to understand what the users are looking for and adapt our offerings int he future

Thanks

Imo, cloud storage seems to be more reliable than storage with raid or maybe ceph. Also cloud storage with pay for what you use sometimes can be cheaper than server with static storage size. If I choose server with smaller storage first, I don't want to get struggle to move to bigger storage server later

tetech

@Hani said:
Why you would prefer cloud storage using an API than normal VPS with huge storage ?

1. What is the level of redundancy on your VPS storage? Most of the cloud storage providers offer substantially beyond what a "RAID10" VPS offers.

2. Highly dependent on user, but the backend may need to be supported by backup software.

servarica_hani

@akhfa said:

Imo, cloud storage seems to be more reliable than storage with raid or maybe ceph. Also cloud storage with pay for what you use sometimes can be cheaper than server with static storage size. If I choose server with smaller storage first, I don't want to get struggle to move to bigger storage server later

I see , talking about us and I think most providers that sell storage vps has similar setup .
We separate compute from storage
So our storage is SAN storage . That mean we can add all the storage we have to single VPS . and actually we can upgrade the client VPS storage without even rebooting his vps.

for reliability I think even cloud providers give exact details about their backup strategy for their solution and when you get to the cheapest tier they have no backup usually.

I think soon we will offer pay per use services (I always though static server that you know exactly how much you will be paying for is better for users )

But I get the general idea here , that huge company are more reliable in the eyes of the customer (unfortunately that's something we cant do or fix as we will never reach fraction of their size)

servarica_hani

@tetech said:

@Hani said:
Why you would prefer cloud storage using an API than normal VPS with huge storage ?

1. What is the level of redundancy on your VPS storage? Most of the cloud storage providers offer substantially beyond what a "RAID10" VPS offers.

The current solution we have is based on raidz2 with frequent snapshots . When we were on ceph we were using replicated pool of size 2 . I know most big provider who use ceph are either using replication of size 2 or 3 never heard more than that. (usually the cheaper you go the less replication is done)

2. Highly dependent on user, but the backend may need to be supported by backup software.

Noted . I think that can be fixed once we offer cloud based storage

Thanks

tetech

Hani said: But I get the general idea here , that huge company are more reliable in the eyes of the customer (unfortunately that's something we cant do or fix as we will never reach fraction of their size)

It is not just branding and marketing. For example

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/features/#Data_durability_and_reliability

Replication across availability zones, multiple devices within each zone, published durability, etc. VPS does not do all that.

tetech

Hani said: The current solution we have is based on raidz2 with frequent snapshots . When we were on ceph we were using replicated pool of size 2 . I know most big provider who use ceph are either using replication of size 2 or 3 never heard more than that. (usually the cheaper you go the less replication is done)

Sure, that may be fine depending on my use case. If I've got something frequently changing like a database, this might be a really good solution.

But if I'm using it to archive irreplaceable stuff like backups of family photos, it better be super close to 100% reliable, perform periodic checks that data is not degrading over time, etc. And even then I won't put all my eggs in that one basket.

AnthonySmith

@Nate812 said:
@NiPlex

Name shamed.

I reported this guy for "PM offers" yesterday.

Nate812

@AnthonySmith said:

@Nate812 said:
@NiPlex

Name shamed.

I reported this guy for "PM offers" yesterday.

Shock he still around. Must be resale colo crossing.

desperand

Hani said: Why you would prefer cloud storage using an API than normal VPS with huge storage ?

For example we offer VPS with 2TB Storage and unlimited 100mbps traffic for 10$/month.

Many reasons.

1. Advertising do 99% of their job...

The main reason: "we" (even me, who are on LET) not always knows about such offers or alternatives. This is a main reason: that we simply do not know about such offers, and you (providers) have very hard conditions to make direct announce to "us" about your offer due a lot of reasons (mostly always - luck of extra money for advertising because of small business (advertising costs a lot of money)).

Big companies paying to:
- big advertising networks millions of dollars
- media, tv, all online magazines, and specialized sites for paid posts, topics, advertising
- almost all sources of taking any information from google. I will never find a 1TB storage offer on a first 3-5 google page results for sure from some good readable VPS provider if I will write: "I need cloudstorage vps" or offers prices will be too high.

2. Price

Almost always very hard to find an offer which will be below a popular provider.
Current price for 1TB/mo is $60 annually almost at all popular cloud storages.
Because of a reason 1 above, to find a vps storage (even if you motivated to find it) it will be super hard, almost always you will see an offers with much higher price tag for 1TB of storage like 30-40$ / mo or more...

Output from google (first page of results) for query: "storage vps"

just example...

or

or

or

or

or

or

or

or

or

or

or

or

And so on.

As you see on screenshots above "we" (me) as a user(s) see next:

1. Price for storage 1TB >= 10$ / mo
2. Price for storage < 10$ / mo for 1TB = always out of stock. (not available for buying (always))
3. Companies which offer cheap storage usually much less reputable than any other big player (this is one of the key factors)

Now let's check average price per TB for cloudstorage providers from big players:

query: "cloudstorage 1TB" results from google

or

or

or

or

or

3. Reputation and no trust...

Yes, google and mega and others have a bad reputation, but at least many users will pick them (for example me) and will use encryption part and will be sure that the data will not lose, will be okay for a long time, and so on... Yes, maybe this is a wrong statement, but I trust more google drive where I never lost any file, than to any VPS provider (sorry dear providers for that) with which (some of them) I had many data losses in the past...

4. Luck of infrastructure to manage files with VPS.

And the last one, and the most important one is this point.

Why? Simply beacuse there are NO free at all good tools, or usable things which will work out the box and will do their job well like doing any big fish above.

You can write: "hey, but what about Nextcloud, owncloud, pydio, seafile??"

My answer will: "have you ever tried to install / setup / configure it properly / and use it?"

I did, I faced many data leaks, I got a lot of pain and issues with resource consumption (because always storage VPS < 20$ / mo for 1TB tag have very limited resources) and when you share a file for your community and many people at the same time downloading something - you have throttled resources, high cpu usage, and errors, which breaking downloading or making a lot of problems to end users to whom you shared your link.

Also, there are dozens of issues with just simple uploading a data to storage VPS on maximum speed. You have to work a lot to optimize / tune up kernel for maximum speeds, you have to have knowledge and experience in all of this to make it just work.

Then you will face dozens of issues while uploading for example not a single file, but for example bunch of files in a folder.

Even when you will solve all the issues faced after a lot of time, you at the end will face another problems with the sharing link, or links looks weird, or exposed not needed data, and so on....

Almost all of this headcache I do not have have with mega/google/onedrive/mediafire/dropbox and so on.

My steps with big fish for 1TB:

1. Find one
2. Buy it
3. Download their app / client
4. Upload files
5. Share link.

My steps with any VPS for 1TB:

1. Spend hours or even days to find a good provider which not out of stock, which will not closed after a day or a moths, which will not destroy your files, or will out of the business with normal price below cloudstorages
2. Now wait when your VPS will be activated (up to extra 48 hours)
3. Now search what tools I will install to make my VPS similar to cloudstorage of popular providers with ability simply upload / download / share features. Spend another hours or even days just to finding in dozens of crap apps only one which will work just fine. Start processing each one by one to realize that it's not feed your needs and everytime destroy all of the data, re-install VPS, so on... Start from the scratch over and over again. Nice!
4. Finally when you installed and found good solution or stayed with sharing files by direct links (because most of the solutions in the market (free one) = crap). Now it's time to share your files
5. Ooops 3-5 clients starting to download the file - CPU 100%, disk sub-system under heavy load too, upload speed balanced between these 3-5-10 clients, and each of them have download speed 5-6mbit/s while they have 100mbit/s uplinks.
   Okay, another case: i need to download these files just right now - i capped to this capacity... While any cloud storage offer 1gbit+ port...
6. I need to keep secure all of my setup, and keep tracking it every single day otherwise all of my files will be exposed to the internet because of new exploits founded in these free tools.
7. People outside of EU have slow download speeds, while any big provider have CDN's which somehow do some magic that offer good speed around the world....
8. And finally a provider or dies, or have planned or unplanned maintenance, or provider got ddosed (very frequent) and you're affect too, and many many many many other reasons...

Jun

Once nice thing about b2 over wasabi is that they physically ship the harddisk or usb of the data you stored on them for free. It may be useful for some who want to backup their home server with bad internet speed to restore.

jsg

Prometeus offers their TeraKVM (1TB) for 9€/mo (if paid annually) with Raided spindles 1 TB plus a 100 or so GB SSD.
Another storage/backup option that might be attractive (thought to be solid yet still not expensive) is C14. Just be sure to select the right model for you.

Zurg

What about Sync Business Solo?
$10/m for 3 TB?

https://www.sync.com/pricing/

willie

Sync appears to require installing an app (desktop or mobile), i.e. it's something like dropbox. No thanks I'd only want stuff with standard protocols.

Right now I have some stuff in C14 Intensive and some other stuff scattered around various storage servers. I'm spending a little too much and need to consolidate some, but for not-super-valuable archival stuff I'm reasonably comfortable having a primary copy on a dedi server, and 1 or 2 backups on geographically separate storage servers of whatever type (VPS, C14, etc.)

kaz050457

I have onedrive education account(legit owner).. I can create a account with custom domain(5tb storage).. Just give me 1gb ram vps.as long as the vps run your account will be active..

chocolateshirt

@kaz050457 said:
I have onedrive education account(legit owner).. I can create a account with custom domain(5tb storage).. Just give me 1gb ram vps.as long as the vps run your account will be active..

Forget it..