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Comment by kefka | Hacker News Reader

Before you mention "Cheap options" and Amazon Glacier, read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365

"How I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier"

> If you’re retrieving more than 5% of your stuff, expect to pay a fee, “starting at $0.011 per gigabyte”.

Key words here is "starting at". as in, no cap on how much they can and will charge you for your data. Cause you know, 60GB is realllly expensive to transfer :(

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What Glacier seems to be for, is more like compliance paperwork and other "We are required to save this for X years" kind of paperwork. Because most of those types of documents, you don't care about and only legally have to keep available. And if a court case comes along, the Glacier retrieval price can just be added on top of court fees (which in that case, Glacier is probably a pittance even at the $10k level).

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There's a lot of articles about these things that seem to have the same summary: "I didn't read the documentation for how pricing works and then I was surprised by how pricing worked." Some people were shocked by Glacier's egress pricing and others were shocked by the cost per file. Both of these are approximately zero, most of the time, for most people, if they know what they're doing. If you don't know what you're doing and haven't read the docs you shouldn't be using Glacier.

> Cause you know, 60GB is realllly expensive to transfer :(

Network and disk IO capacity planning is hard. You can't just buy GBs of egress at $0.01 and then resell them at $0.01, because you're paying for maximum capacity and turning around and selling average usage. Similarly, when you have a bunch of data shoved into unused sections of disk, you can't just read them back out without affecting whatever else is reading from the same disk. If you want to sell something close to cost, you need to reflect the pricing structure of what you're paying to your customers.

So if you upload a bunch of data to a super-cold storage system that's even named after a geological formation that stays frozen for centuries, to remind you how cold it is, and then you make it hot by trying to download it all at once, you'd expect it to be more expensive.

Just do your regular cost-benefit analysis and it should be fine, based on how long you plan on storing the data and how likely or often you think you'll need to restore it.

The root problem here is , that Amazon Glacier is as opaque as mud about pricing. Or did the words "Starting At" not pique your buzzword bullshit detector? It certainly did mine.

Pricing means sifting through a legalese dense block of text to try to come up with even a way to estimate the costs. That is a problem. I should be given a rough cost expectation up front. Sure, it's not going to be exact and all, but This article is about a cost factor of *180.. That's the difference between an iPad and a Ferrari.

Other places of varying types of backup systems are a lot more clearer to tell how much I should be expected to pay. Or at least, I get within +/- 10%. Glacier? "Yeah, Don't worry about it till we bill ya!" That's the scam with all these cloud services really. Once we have your nuts in a vice, we can squeeze and extract, cause you don't have any other choice, now do you?

I think the information you're working with might be out of date, I don't see the words "starting at" anywhere. Glacier egress pricing is $0.01 per GB and $0.05 per 1,000 requests. That's for standard retrievals. Not so complicated.

Before Feb 2017, it did work with the peak hourly request fees. Those were well documented. Apparently peak transfer rates were "confusing". I didn't think so, after all, that's similar to how I pay for internet access at home (I pay based on capacity, not based on bytes transferred).

Glacier pricing has changed since that post. It's now a much simpler model, around $0.10/GB to download. The original pricing was very complicated though!

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

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