

Ask HN: Why does VPS disk space cost so much? - retube

My VPS provider (intrahost) charge £10 / month / 10GB of disk. Looking around this seems to be about average. Given that I can buy 1TB of commodity disk for £50, amortising this cost over a year (which is probably aggressive) means that my VPS disk space is 240 times more expensive!!<p>Even if priced against data centre-type hardware, it's still an insane mark-up.
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jacquesm
Because they have you by the short and curlies and you can't solve it without
going through them.

It's a typical trick of an 'unbundled' service where you find out long after
the buy-in point (and when there are serious expenses involved in moving) that
it is more expensive than you thought after all. That's why I still maintain
that regular, dedicated hosting is unbeatable both for high storage and high
bandwidth solutions. If you just want to play in the pool you might get a
better deal using virtual servers but as soon as things get a bit more serious
you will probably want to move. The same goes for 'the cloud'.

There are good use cases for this stuff but there are plenty of online
concepts for which they are not a good match and way too expensive for what
you get.

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rbanffy
It probably comes with some services and redundancy. If your drive fails, you
won't experience downtime (probably because there is no such thing as "your
drive"), the operators will replace the failed disk in the shared array and
you won't have to even know it happened. The same probably with backups.

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retube
re redundancy i assume this is correct. A disk failure should be transparent.
However this can easily be accomplished with raid, which may double the disk
cost but not much more. As for backups, this price does not include backing
up.

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rbanffy
Even if they don't give you the backups, the array should be backed up. They
couldn't afford to lose your data.

And redundancy does not only increase the cost of the physical, it also
increases maintenance, since the devices fail and have to be replaced. Also,
we are not talking hard disks here. If a server, memory, processor or anything
else fails, it will be replaced and your virtual machine (and all others that
happen to run on the failed hardware) will be migrated to another chassis so
it can continue running. If they have supernaturally high availability, it
could even be running in sync on two different boxes with smooth handover in
case one fails and you won't even notice there was a glitch.

But I guess that's too much to ask yet. I am not aware this kind of technology
has been developed.

