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(Home) Production Level Cloud Storage / Dev Server - can you give me advice?
Hey, nice girls and guys:
I am questioning myself what the cheapest path to reliable storage is these days. I am looking for really cheap storage comparable to hosting yourself at home. Let me share my thoughts: I currently have about 100TB in my home / dev server. This seems to be a good time to let go of it.
And I don't really need 100TB. But whenever I look (even in the before AI times) storage and compute online are extremely expensive. This is more of a prosumer project and I bought the TB HDD for probably 3 EUR or so and I bought SSDs at 10 EUR / TB - used. Enterprise SATA Samsung MLC (!!!).
I cannot afford backups of that much data, so I am running RAIDZ1 on the bulk / HDD storage and I mirror for the SSD storage. I know the risk, ... but I just could not afford it.
So ... I wonder: If I could get those prices, why can I outcompete DCs by factors of whatever. I mean oftentimes a TB costs 3 / 4 EUR a month even with cheap vendors. I understand that power and service and so on is not free. But there must be a way to get cheap storage online or is there really not?
And the other issue that keeps me hosting at home is my dev server. I currently have a 5950X with 128GB DDR4 ECC for compiling stuff (same CPU, pulling double duty). And I would really like to ditch it in favor of an cloud offering. But that seems hard to come by. I often see servers like that goign for 100s a month when I paid maybe 200 for the chip, 50 for the mainboard and we dont talk about the RAM.
Same story: I have bursty usage. I do sleep (occassionally). There should be a cheaper way. But the power bill is next to nothing compared to getting this online. So what am I getting wrong?
TLDR: How to get cheap storage online? Where to get a cheap dev VPS online? And when you hunt for cheap storage are you trying to get S3 directly or rather a VPS and install S3 on it?
Best and excuse me for my rambling 
Comments
@averagedatahoarder
Also, if it's culturally/historically important, offload to archive.org
Storage side : I think you should try @PulsedMedia offer, regular linux shell account basically, but come with TB of storage space & uncommon features (torrent [main feature], vpn, rootless docker, [newly intoduced] AI, etc). Incoming bw were free, outgoing depend on the package.
This offer were open new user with low budget & buy more if so desired. More cheap package were still cooking until end of this year. Also interact in the thread with your order number(s) will get you extra.
Personally use Sia crypto storage, been solid reliable replication & backups handled for me, price is solid if u don't need much traffic and select hosts well.
https://sia.tech/
Mount at home, on a good priced VPS cheap dedi, up to you
dont even see the price tab/page
I'm pretty sure you're already doing it the cheapest way possible.
You'll quickly lose any cost advantage by moving to cloud services. And unless you pay for a reputable provider, you'll still have to manage your backups carefully and make sure they're actually recoverable. Cheap hosting can be great, but you need to understand the trade-offs.
Premium providers do offer some genuine advantages. Data centres generally have better physical security, protection against local disasters such as fires and floods, redundant power and network connectivity, and better infrastructure for high availability. All of that costs money.
For your use case, though, I think the biggest issue is that you're comparing the cost of hardware you've already bought with the recurring cost of a service that includes infrastructure, power, bandwidth, maintenance and support. With bursty workloads, cloud compute can make sense, but storage at that scale is much harder to justify economically.
Thanks for pushing me towards sia. 50GB free does not help much and the rest is pricy, but I will use it for an app using s3. That looks fun. I will also be looking into pulsed media. But I am not too sure they would like my workload. I have the feeling they are banking on deduplication alot and effective storage therefore being much lower. My data however is unique. So ... I really need the TB. So, i would be a heavy user.
That's just sia's own service on-top of there network.
you can self-host a node on a cheap VPS and pay as much as you want, and pick and choose the hosts you use, and the redudancy level. (That pricey service is because its all done for you) there are other's cheaper than use the sia network if you want managed