> I don't buy remote hosted storage, so when I saw $12/month for 1TB I was like "whoa, that's way too cheap to be reliable".
The standard market rate is actually closer to $10/TB and that's from the big providers like Google.
> 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.
It's actually not as hard as you think. I built and colocate my own 56TB rackmount and over 4 or so years (the warranty on the drives) it works out to around $2.5 per raw TB, inclusive of all hardware and bandwidth. Optimize that for storage (a lot of my server costs are compute), scale it up, assume the server will live 8 years or so until you replace it and you should be able to get that below a dollar per raw TB. Replicate a few times and you're done.
> The prices of different providers seems almost spastic, running from $1.50 to $150 for a terabyte of backup. Unless there's very good reasons for the variance in price, something seems fishy.
The reasons are variations in replication (for example 3 copies vs 2 copies vs no copies vs 10+3 erasure coding), support, location and bandwidth prices I imagine.
The standard market rate is actually closer to $10/TB and that's from the big providers like Google.
> 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.
It's actually not as hard as you think. I built and colocate my own 56TB rackmount and over 4 or so years (the warranty on the drives) it works out to around $2.5 per raw TB, inclusive of all hardware and bandwidth. Optimize that for storage (a lot of my server costs are compute), scale it up, assume the server will live 8 years or so until you replace it and you should be able to get that below a dollar per raw TB. Replicate a few times and you're done.
> The prices of different providers seems almost spastic, running from $1.50 to $150 for a terabyte of backup. Unless there's very good reasons for the variance in price, something seems fishy.
The reasons are variations in replication (for example 3 copies vs 2 copies vs no copies vs 10+3 erasure coding), support, location and bandwidth prices I imagine.