Jeremy and
Dave figured out backing up to Amazon S3 is cheaper than running your own server. S3 charges $0.15/GB/month storage and an additional $0.20/GB transfer. On the other hand,
Go Daddy only charges $0.06/GB/month storage, and you get 2 terabytes/month transfer for free. Jeremy calculated S3 will cost him $1,688 for 5 years. Go Daddy would only cost $719.40, a savings of
$968.60, more than half. This doesn't even count the cost of restoring from an S3 backup: $25 for Jeremy's current 125 GB vs. free for Go Daddy. And Go Daddy supports a fairly widely adopted API: FTP.
I'm sure S3 uses replication while Go Daddy performs nightly backups, but I'll probably only back up at most once a day anyway.
yeah, but then you're not part of the cool web-servicy, cloudy, SOA crowd... making common-sense decisions like that is SO not going to get you a book-deal with O'Reilly! :-)
ReplyDeleteThat's SO like "SO not Service-Oriented" :)
ReplyDeleteOf course, if your backup clashes with their daily backup, you can be assured that they'll always be able to restore a broken image, so you'd want storage equal to twice the size of your image.
ReplyDeleteYou get the performance you pay for.
ReplyDeleteInformal testing today shows S3 to be approximately 5x - 10x faster in delivering content back to me vs. GoDaddy virtual hosting plan.