For all the great ingestion capabilities of rsync.net, their pricing still isn't nearly competitive with any of the cloud storage services.
Could someone from rsync.net explain why? Am I looking at rsync.net the wrong way? Is it meant to serve a different use case?
The front page of the website says "Cloud Storage for Offsite Backups" but the pricing shows that it costs 8-20c/month depending on usage. Meanwhile GCS Nearline and Amazon Glacier (also offsite backup products) are at 1c/GB and even their regular storage is at ~3c.
Sell me. What does rsync.net offer me that justifies an 8x-20x price bump?
I don't have anything to do with rsync.net, but having looked at both AWS and them:
How cheap Amazon is heavily depends on your retrieval needs. Glacier is basically for gigantic data vaults where you will never need to retrieve more than a small fraction of it. It's very cheap for that, but has retrieval fees if you need to retrieve >5% of your data at any given time, and they can be very high if you need to retrieve a significant amount of the data quickly (also, there's a 4-hour minimum retrieval latency, so you wouldn't want any possibly-needed-for-operations backups there). S3 allows your storage to be "online" full-time, but adds a $0.09/GB bandwidth charge for outgoing data, in addition to the $0.03/GB storage fee, so overall price depends heavily on what you're pulling out of it.
The $0.06/GB promotional offer in this rsync.net post actually seems surprisingly cheap, for always-online storage with no additional bandwidth fees. Even their normal prices seem pretty fair to me, for something that comes with full phone/email support, provides a regular POSIX filesystem with SSH access instead of a weird custom API, etc. If I were warehousing petabytes of never-to-be-needed data, the price difference over Glacier would be hard to ignore. But for a lot of needs it seems quite competitive to S3.
Thanks for asking - I like having the chance to sketch out our value.
First, glacier and nearline are not online storage. They are not random access datastores that you can interact with in real time with arbitrary applications. There's not a comparison to be made there.
I think the proper comparison is with Amazon S3 and I hope you'll allow me to approximate their pricing, on average, to 4-5 cents per GB, per month. The headline price for storage, of course, is ~3 cents, but you are charged for all outbound data as well as certain IO operations. I think 4-5 cents is a decent approximation.
So ...
If you're just walking in off the street and getting a small quantity of rsync.net storage, yes, it is 4-5x the price of S3 and you are paying that premium for UNIX-native storage and a phone number / email address that connects you to a real engineer (sometimes me, actually). Given that, at these smaller quantities, you're paying $10 or $20 per month, I think that's a very, very high value for the money.
If you're using larger amounts of storage, the pricing gets down to ~6 cents per GB (assuming annual discount) or even 3 cents per GB at petabyte levels. So at 10+ TB quantities we are just barely more expensive than S3 and at petabyte quantities we are decidedly cheaper.[1]
As always, if you're a small end user, email us about the HN discount which is quite substantial.
[1] Actually, it's even more competitive relative to S3 since, by default, all accounts have 7 daily ZFS snapshots enabled and 1+ TB accounts have 7 daily + 4 weekly. Those typically add between 20-40% space usage on our end, but you don't pay for that ... on S3 you would indeed pay for that retention and you'd have to roll your own snapshot/retention script/logic. At rsync.net, Apple-style "time machine" snapshots are "just there".
Could someone from rsync.net explain why? Am I looking at rsync.net the wrong way? Is it meant to serve a different use case?
The front page of the website says "Cloud Storage for Offsite Backups" but the pricing shows that it costs 8-20c/month depending on usage. Meanwhile GCS Nearline and Amazon Glacier (also offsite backup products) are at 1c/GB and even their regular storage is at ~3c.
Sell me. What does rsync.net offer me that justifies an 8x-20x price bump?