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James Hamilton: The Cost of Bulk Cold Storage: $0.80/GB/year (mvdirona.com)
19 points by wmf on Dec 28, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


Right now, we've seen pretty constant pricing from "cloud" providers like Amazon and Slicehost. While they probably had razor thin margins a few years ago, they're probably decent now. As technology improves, they'll probably have to reduce pricing to remain competitive. In fact, Linode (who has been around for 5 years, considerably longer than Slicehost) has seen constant upgrades.

Linode has gone from, on their base plan: 64MB 2003 80MB 2005 100MB 2006 128MB Jan 2007 256MB Mar 2007 300MB Sep 2007 360MB Dec 2007

Similar increases in transfer and disk space have been seen over this time period (http://blog.linode.com/category/upgrades/).

I expect that Amazon and Slicehost will start offering more as pricing comes down. With virtualization being offered by more and more firms, they'll have to follow market pricing and as disks and RAM get cheaper and cheaper, what is offered will go up. Margins are probably decent now as he notes in his posts. As such, anytime storage or RAM falls by half, we should see a discount in the cost to us.


Wow does he need to fix his css. Making hovers shrink is just plain stupid. What's funny is if you hover and then move your cursor just far enough to the right, it flashes on and off in an infinite loop.


I think this is a case of WYSIWYG editing gone awry; there's also a mix of serif and sans serif.


Note that storage redundancy is four. I wasn't expecting that, damn.

So (without the administration cost guess) you can get four copies at $0.72/GB/year.




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