storage for user-generated media?

[aa_aa]

I'm curious: How are startups here managing their storage needs, especially when it comes to storing multiple MG and even GB of photos, videos, and other media per user?

Amazon S3 seems to be the "in" solution right now, but when you do the math, it gets pretty expensive as you start nearing multiple TB of storage. Managing your own NAS at a colocated facility seems like it would be cheaper, but then you have all the additional admin overhead of colocating.

Has anyone found a good VPS or dedicated server provider that offers lots of storage and bandwidth at reasonable rates? Or is colocation pretty much the way to go? Other options?

[cperciva]

Amazon S3 seems to be the "in" solution right now, but when you do the math, it gets pretty expensive as you start nearing multiple TB of storage.

I've done the math, and (at least compared to renting dedicated servers) Amazon S3 is reasonably priced well into the TB range. The cheapest prices I've seen advertised for bulk storage servers online are at softlayer, where it's possible to get down to about $80/TB-month (they have TB drives for $50/month, but you need a server to contain them) compared to S3's $140/TB-month ($0.15 / 2^30 bit-months); but that's for unreplicated storage, and you'll find it very hard to get good performance and reliability (considering that drives will inevitably fail) for less than a 2x increase in price.

I haven't done the math on colocation (and that involves more of a judgement call, valuing capital costs vs. monthly expenses) but I suspect that any system you can design which is anywhere near as reliable as S3 will end up being fairly close to it in price.

[aaroneous]

S3 is ~$150/TB for scalable, high-availability, low-latency, redundant storage, with on-demand pricing -- no power costs, or overhead admin. Your post makes it sound like S3 is the latest fashion, but my reasons (and others) are why it's gaining popularity, especially around the startup scene.

[aa_aa → aaroneous]

Good points. I probably should have worded my original post differently so as not to imply that S3 was simply being used because of its popularity. It's clear that its popularity comes in large part to its utility.

Still, I'm curious what other solutions are being used out there. (For instance, with 1 TB hard drives {at 7200 rpm} retailing for $200-$300 these days, perhaps someone has come up with a storage method that's an even better deal than S3?)

[aa_aa]

er, "multiple MG" = "multiple MB"