Why is backup storage so expensive?
I've been browsing around for a small cheap vps, and something odd caught my attention.
For example:
A VPS at Contabo with 2 cores, 4 GB RAM and 300GB SSD is 3.99€ a month. Fair enough, not a bad price at all.
While ordering above mentioned VPS, you can add backup space. That is a separate storage accessible via ftp/sftp where you can store backups. For 100GB of backup storage, the monthly fee increases with 3.99€.
Now this doesn't make sense to me. Instead of paying for 100GB of storage only, I could buy a complete second VPS and get 3 times the storage for the same price!
I have seen similar pricing on a lot of other providers, and I just cant figure out why backup storage costs equal to or often a lot more then a complete VPS.
Why is backup space/secondary storage so damn expensive?
Comments
Simple: redundancy.
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Care to elaborate on that?
Do you mean that backup is a redundant service that most people choose not to use, or that the storage must have data redundancy and therefor is expensive?
Contabo's backup storage is RAID6 while their VPS lineup doesn't mention any kind of raid setup. And there's also fee to maintain the backup server, etc. but if I were you, I'd just pay Backblaze B2 or Wasabi for way cheaper.
The VPS storage is SSD. I would imagine SSD storage is more expensive then a RAID6.
And maintaining the hardware that runs the VPS's is not free, I find it hard to see how maintaining a storageserver for backup would be more expensive.
Basically, I can not for the life of me get the numbers to add up here.
Just looking at the datacenters where I have worked, there is no way a pure storagesystem is even close to the same price to buy/maintain as a fully featured VM environment.
Simple: money.
Most people care more about the brand name than the price if the difference is only a few bucks.
If you want cheaper storage VPSes, feel free to PM me.
But that VPS storage isn't SSD. It's "SSD-boosted", which is SSD caching. The disk itself is HDD.
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
As @deank and @sanvit said, there's a guaranteed redundancy (RAID6) for the added storage (which is housed separately from the VPS on a different server).
If you simply need more disk space, go for a bigger VPS.
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
The equation is not that simple.
Things to account for:
Mostly this.
@rcy026 you're paying them to make sure your data is available and recoverable when needed. Checkout the recent Ghandi storage debacle where they did things on the cheap and people lost data.
Real redundancy is pretty expensive to maintain.
I emphasis on "real" cuz we've seen some companies failing on redundancy despite having advertised so.
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Another thing you have to keep in mind is LICENSING. Many storage server solutions require ridiculous licensing costs. That's just for the servers/NAS themselves. Add licensing for backup and restore software, and it's a small fortune.
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Slightly non LES spirit but useful knoweldge anyway:
Check out O365 family plan. 5TB (6?) onedrive for like 100 bucks per year. Probably less on special. Not gonna deadpool on you and comes with well 6x office and 6x skype mins. Addressable via oauth so some backup solutions can write to it
But most of the backup storage I've seen has been simple ftp/sftp solutions.
I could setup such a solution with any totally free linuxdist at zero software/licensing cost.
I'm almost considering getting some storage just to see what it actually is. By just reading the descriptions I've seen it actually just looks like its stock servers with a bunch of disks running freenas or something similar.
I think you guys are reading a bit more into it then intended. Most offers I've seen is simply "100 gig space, accessible via ftp/sftp". No one has mentioned any redundancy, licensed software, multiple locations or fancy stuff like that.
I just find it hard to believe that a company that sells 300gig VPS's för €30 would have a high-end datastorage with 3x the cost per gig for simple ftp backups.
if you willing to hdd storage, i'm using 2TB for 8 buck
for archives i'd just store it in C14