I am building a large database for my analysis tool ~3 Terabytes.

The issue is distributing this database for people to use it.

A solution we have learned from working with sequencing cores is to ship a hard drive by FedEx.  A possibly expensive and annoying proposition.  

Another solution is to host the files for download, but this seems possibly expensive or possibly impractical for the audience.  (On this point of practicality -- most Universities have gigabit level bandwidth, perhaps 3 Terabytes is no longer a ludicrous download size, simply a big one.)  At 1 gigabit, I estimate the download would take 400 minutes.

Since this is a niche' problem, I am hoping someone may have had a similar issue and can provide advice?

Thank you
Jeremy Cox
You have already covered all bases. There is no reduced cost alternative here. 

Amazon or Google storage (perhaps the cheapest data buckets if no compute needs to be done on the data). Storing it in one place and sharing as needed is the best solution. Google storage has [good access control options][1] that work in google compute.


  [1]: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/access-control/