Title: With a price tag of $0.150/GB/month, storing 1TB of data costs around $150/month on Amazon S3. But this is a recurring amount. So, for the <i>same</i> amount of data it would cost $1800/year and $3600/2-years. And this doesn't even include the data transfer costs.<p>Consider the alternative, with colocation the hardware cost of storing 1TB of data on two machines (for redundancy) would be around $1500/year. But this is fixed. And increasing the storage capacity on each machine can be done at the price of $0.1/GB. Which means that a RAID-1+redundant copies of data on multiple servers for 4TB of data could be achieved at $3000/year and $6000/2-years in a colocation facility. Whereas on S3 the same would cost $7200/year and $14,400/2-years.<p>Also, adding bandwidth+power+h/w replacement costs at a colocation facility would still keep the costs significantly lower than Amazon S3.<p>Given this math, what is the rationale behind going with Amazon S3? The Smugmug case study of 600TB of data stored on S3 seems misleading.<p>I do see several services that offer unlimited storage which is actually hosted on S3. For example, Smugmug, Carbonite etc. all offer unlimited storage for a fixed annual fee. Wouldn't this send the costs out of the roof on Amazon S3?<p>If your startup is using Amazon S3 for its storage needs, for the benefit of the startup community, can you please elaborate your rationale for choosing this service?
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