That's the cost of a new 500GB SSD per month! For the cost of three months' EBS storage and a couple of hours you could setup your own RAID array with a spare for backups and possibly get better uptimes than Amazon :P
I guess this just boils down again to Amazon not being cost effective enough for my use case in yet another way.
Oh, and good luck creating snapshots of your home RAID!
Definitely not $50 to my knowledge but for ~$170 you can get a Samsung 850 EVO which is rated for 98k IOPS. They're fairly reliable drives and much, much faster than anything you'll get on EBS. You could be running that full 3x replication in less than a year of paying for EBS.
> Oh, and good luck creating snapshots of your home RAID!
LVM, ZFS and Btrfs all do snapshotting quite nicely. FreeNAS - commonly used for consumer grade NASes will automatically manage ZFS snapshots for you too. Amazon will sell you extra space to store snapshots, sure, but increasing the size of your devices usually solves that problem. And quite cost effectively as you can probably tell by now...
Dropbox targets end users who don't have the knowledge required to use the alternative, if you're smart enough to use EBS you're probably smart enough to use ZFS snapshotting just as easily. Or could within a day or two. It's really not that hard.
Like I said, there are systems that pretty much manage the whole thing for you and just warn you when something is about to blow up like FreeNAS.
Shadow volume replication is entirely possible with several filesystems or Hot Copy kernel mod. Also LVM does snapshotting fairly easily
I may have got my prices a bit mixed up (I saw 120GB at Fry's for $60 last month) but my point stands.
Also why is discomfort such a big problem for folks? Learn stuff.
zfs snap tank/data@$(date '+Y%m%d')
zfs send tank/data@$(date '+Y%m%d') | zfs recv backup/data
advanced magic for off-system backup
zfs send tank/data@$(date '+Y%m%d') | ssh cheapdiskserver zfs recv tank/data