> It's very hard for me to imagine how a company can have a large number of customers, each with 1TB of highly redundant data with high service uptime and immediate support, for $12/month.
Some of them (I remember Tarsnap's page about this) outsource the storage itself to AWS.
$12 per TB per month would give a slight profit margin on the S3 Standard - Infrequent Access class (currently, a profit of about $2.20 per TB per month) and a significant profit margin on Glacier (about $10.90), with an appreciable loss (about $6.50) if the average customer block exceeded the Infrequent Access restrictions. It might be possible to make the client optimize accesses in some way that makes it less likely that many blocks will exceed Infrequent Access rules, and maybe even to try to keep the typical block in Glacier instead?
It seems like an interesting challenge. (Yes, support and administrative costs need to come out of that profit margin.)
Also, Amazon apparently offers "lifecycle policies" to try to do this automatically instead of explicitly. It seems like those policies try to migrate blocks into a cheaper tier that assumes less frequent access if the blocks have not, in fact, been accessed on a certain schedule. A cloud storage vendor using AWS as its backend could then try to optimize manually at the per-user level, or just let AWS do it itself empirically, which wouldn't save quite as much money as correct guesses about what particular users will do with particular data, but would require minimal engineering effort on the vendor's part.
Edit: It seems like it will be hard to compete with the AWS/S3 backend for this kind of service! Now I wonder if there are providers who are known not to use S3.
Some of them (I remember Tarsnap's page about this) outsource the storage itself to AWS.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
$12 per TB per month would give a slight profit margin on the S3 Standard - Infrequent Access class (currently, a profit of about $2.20 per TB per month) and a significant profit margin on Glacier (about $10.90), with an appreciable loss (about $6.50) if the average customer block exceeded the Infrequent Access restrictions. It might be possible to make the client optimize accesses in some way that makes it less likely that many blocks will exceed Infrequent Access rules, and maybe even to try to keep the typical block in Glacier instead?
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#sia_anchor
It seems like an interesting challenge. (Yes, support and administrative costs need to come out of that profit margin.)
Also, Amazon apparently offers "lifecycle policies" to try to do this automatically instead of explicitly. It seems like those policies try to migrate blocks into a cheaper tier that assumes less frequent access if the blocks have not, in fact, been accessed on a certain schedule. A cloud storage vendor using AWS as its backend could then try to optimize manually at the per-user level, or just let AWS do it itself empirically, which wouldn't save quite as much money as correct guesses about what particular users will do with particular data, but would require minimal engineering effort on the vendor's part.
Edit: It seems like it will be hard to compete with the AWS/S3 backend for this kind of service! Now I wonder if there are providers who are known not to use S3.