
Ask HN: cloud data storage cheaper than AWS S3? - dpapathanasiou
I&#x27;m working on a new neural network based project, which means I&#x27;ll need to access and store more data than I can keep on my hard drives.<p>While I&#x27;m familiar with AWS S3 from my day job, I was wondering what other alternatives are out there that may be cheaper (or even free)?<p>I&#x27;m also aware of dropbox, google docs, etc., but ideally I&#x27;d like to have programmatic access via an API.
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okneil
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-
pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html)

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pentium10
BigQuery with it's $20/TB for active, and half of the price for cold storage,
is the best structured (eg: columns or JSON) solution where import and export
is free. You even get SQL as the product is a data warehouse.

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whalesalad
If you need that much storage, I would posit that cloud storage is going to be
a problem not due to cost but due to network performance. A bunch of cheap
storage is great but if it takes you days to transfer data there it might be a
dealbreaker.

Have you considered a few external hard drives? You can get a couple of
terabytes for pretty cheap these days.

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celerrimus
I assume that everything depends on: \- how much storage you need, \- how long
you need it to store this, \- if this data easy reproducible.

Generally storage isn't cheap, and cloud storage is quite expensive in the
long run. If you need storage for more that a year, I would invest in own
local HDDs - put to your PC or buy used NAS server or PC. You will benefit
with much better performance and this would be the most cost effective
solution.

Keep in mind that often transfer to cheap cloud storage is slow, I tried to
keep my backup in few different providers, it could take literally months to
upload 6TB of data. Also keep in mind that you may be charged for data
transfer separately, for every data access, so cloud cost may be much higher
than expected.

If you plan use this in shorter periods, I would go with OVH offer - they
probably have best quality/cost ratio. Depending on your needs I would suggest
buying dedicated storage server, or use their Data Storage (3x replicated
$0.0112/month/GB, plus outgoing transfer - $0.011/GB). They also have cold
storage for about $0.0023/month/GB.

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nicoburns
Backblaze B2

[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-
storage.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html)

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stu2010
If you can tolerate risk of data loss, VPS or even physical hosts are likely
to be far cheaper than any cloud. Look at OVH, Hetzner, Linode, DigitalOcean.

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webmobdev
Linode, Pair and Rackspace are established players in this field. (Pair.com is
the oldest I know of).

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rumanator
According to Wikipédia, OVH is the third largest hosting company in the world
based on physical services and the largest hosting company in Europe. They are
not a fly by night operation.

And IMHO Hetzner is by far the best service provider there is for bare metal
and plain old VM services.

~~~
webmobdev
Didn't know about OVH, thanks. A long time ago, I was advised to always first
look at the age of the company when choosing a web host. (And then their
financials and client base). I've found this advise to be a solid one. A lot
of web hosting companies fold up ...

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crobibero
Wasabi is decently inexpensive at $.0059 per GB/month
[https://wasabi.com/](https://wasabi.com/)

I currently use it as my personal cloud backup

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Kudos
FWIW, mastodon.social has had frequent problems with the availability of
Wasabi.

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chime
I like Wasabi for the price and use it for my personal 4TB backup. I used
Wasabi for company CCTV storage (100TB+) but switched to Azure Cold storage
because of Wasabi availability issues.

I prefer Wasabi for my personal because I can use my own backup/encryption
scripts (using rclone) instead of closed source service like CrashPlan.

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miohtama
Storj Tardigrade

[https://tardigrade.io/](https://tardigrade.io/)

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rmeertens
Keep in mind that if you use this data often as training data you want to
store it close to your GPU. No point in saving money on the data storage and
have your expensive GPU idle because you are waiting for data to download from
Dropbox...

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wajidansari
Google gets ready for its entry in cloud services market

[https://www.headlinesoftoday.com/technology/tech-
reviews/goo...](https://www.headlinesoftoday.com/technology/tech-
reviews/google-cloud-services-market.html)

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tyingq
You don't mention how much data. At some size point, a cheap storage server
and minio (open source s3 compatible) might be a better value.

At the low end, OVH has a 4×4TB HDD SATA + 1×500GB SSD NVMe server for
~$90/month.

Of course, you have to configure and administer it, so not for everyone.

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zknz
What is your tolerance for losing data?

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heartbeats
Depending on your needs, you can rent a dedicated server with hard drives. For
example, Hetzner has an offering of 10x 10TB HDDs for $200/month or so.

Disclaimer: I have never used Hetzner's services nor can I vouch for them.

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freefaler
I've used them for the last 5 years. They are OK. Their network is not
redundant (core routers) so you should expect some downtime at least once per
year for several hours. But it's the only complaint I have. The good part is
that you can buy several servers for 100-200 EUR and build a decent HA with
fixed monthly cost. Our AWS bill was always hard to predict. Also, they have a
VPS cloud service that is decent and we use it for non-core services.

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bunya017
Scaleway Object Storage

S3 compatible and comes with free bandwidth

[https://www.scaleway.com/en/object-
storage/](https://www.scaleway.com/en/object-storage/)

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Havoc
Too big for my hard drives covers a lot of space.

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haidrali
HETZNER [https://www.hetzner.com/](https://www.hetzner.com/)

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invisiblerobot
s3 may be cheaper than you think.

If you're willing to tolerate hr+ delays in accessing your data aws glacier
deep archive is 70cents per terabyte month.

that's pretty awesome in my book.

If you need to access the data in under an hr it comes out around $2 per TB/mo

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TrueNomad
I am not sure if you are calculating this correctly but for me, 70 cent/TB/mo
is not a realistic number. Cheapest glacier storage for me, is, $0.004 per gb
per mo, which makes a terabyte storage for $4/TB per mo.For me, this number is
at Ohio or Oregon data centers. And their retrieval rates are super expensive,
as in, $0.03 per gb. Glacier might be cheap but it definitely is not the
cheapest.

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invisiblerobot
no cheapest deep archive is 0.0007 per gb month, or 70 cents per tb/mo

note they've recently reduced their pricing so you might be looking at old
marketing. But my latest bill charged me 0.0007

you're right of course that retrieval in an out is much more expensive and so
prob not a great fit for your usecase

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dvasdekis
Why don't you try Usenet? Unlimited storage for $3.14/month[1].

There are a couple of Python libraries out there for posting and fetching, but
it'll definitely be shabbier than a purpose-built service. However, for
seriously large storage requirements, you can't beat that price.

I have a full PC backup I did 5 years ago drifting around on Usenet somewhere.
It was still there when I checked a year ago.

[1][https://newsgroupdirect.com/member/billing/?planid=189&deal=](https://newsgroupdirect.com/member/billing/?planid=189&deal=)
but I've had problems with their service, and personally use FrugalUsenet for
a little more.

