Comment by hoppp
6 months ago
But if you have a lot of data, self hosting is still cheaper.
Its always gonna be cheaper because you don't have the cloud provider's profit margin, which can be quite high.
6 months ago
But if you have a lot of data, self hosting is still cheaper.
Its always gonna be cheaper because you don't have the cloud provider's profit margin, which can be quite high.
It can be quite high, but it doesn't have to be. For instance, I have a 7TB storage server from Hosthatch that's $190 for 2 years. That's $7.92 per month, or £5.88 at today's exchange rates. That's under 20p per day.
Just on electricity costs alone, this is good value. My electricity costs are 22.86p/kWh which is pretty cheap for the UK. That means that if having that drive plugged in and available 24/7 uses more than 37W, it's more expensive to self host at home than rent the space via a server. Also, I've not needed to buy the drive or a NAS, nor do I have to worry about replacing hardware if it fails.
Do they offer deals like that often? List price is "from $24/month" for 6TB (no further details provided without registering an account).
They tend to do promotions, typically only valid for 24h and only advertised on certain forums like LET, a couple of times per year - typically at least around their company anniversary date or Black Friday.
There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.
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For very large amounts of data, the cloud provider can hit economies of scale using tape drives ($$$$ to buy a tape drive yourself) or enterprise-class hard drives (very loud + high price of entry if you want redundancy + higher failure rate than other storage). That's why storing data in the slower storage classes in S3 and other object stores is so cheap compared to buying and replacing drives.