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Comment by mkempe | Hacker News Reader

Key quote: "We are lowering S3 storage prices by 36% to 65%, effective April 1st, 2014."

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

Unless you're storing massive amounts of data, no point in using Glacier now, as it's still $0.01/GB (vs $0.03/GB for standard durability).

And wow. Hell of a price drop.

300% is still 300%.

It's only 300% for the first TB in S3. It gets progressively cheaper after that.

I don't think a few TB counts as "massive", and that still saves you over a grand a year. Why move backups to a 3x more expensive service, what's the upside?

Not having to wait 4-8 hours to access them. Also, pulling from S3 costs you nothing (if you're in EC2 or other AWS services). Glacier access costs can get expensive depending on the quantity of data you need to access in a short period of time:

"Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days."

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

To store 1TB for a year in S3 is now $368.64

To store 1TB in Glacier for a year is $122.88

We're quibbling over ~$250/year?

What if you have 100 TB?

I would quibble over 25k a year..

>Not having to wait 4-8 hours to access them

I can't download the data that fast anyways, it is a total non issue for us.

>Glacier access costs can get expensive depending on the quantity of data you need to access in a short period of time

Yeah, it is for backups. That's why we are talking about how we use it for backups.

>We're quibbling over ~$250/year?

Times the "few TB" we are talking about, that is over a$1k a year, as I said. We're not quibbling. I asked a simple question. Why would I take the time and effort to move my backups from a 1c/GB service to a 3c/GB service? There is no upside. "You can pay an extra $1000 for no reason, which is a great idea because $1000 isn't very much" is not very compelling.

Glacier's pricing is actually very difficult to calculate. If you only ever store data (and never retrieve it), it's easy, but the moment you need to start accessing it, the pricing is actually very difficult to calculate correctly:

> Unlike every other service Amazon provides, with Glacier you're not paying for your net usage throughout each month: Instead, you're paying for your peak hour — and once that peak hour has come and gone, you're still paying for that peak until the end of the month, no matter how low your usage might fall. [0]

Note: I still use Glacier for long-term backup, because that's the exact use case it's meant for. But it's important to be aware of that cost: if I ever need to retrieve that data, I know I need to do it very slowly (and carefully) to avoid racking up a massive bill.

[0] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-thoughts-on-glaci...

It's true that Glacier is a bit tricky, but you can easily cap your retrieval costs (with a bit of margin) if your use-case allows you to choose a maximum retrieval rate, rather than thinking in terms of retrieval amount. If your peak hourly retrieval rate for a month is N Mbps, your cost is no more than $3N. So for example, $30 for a month that includes 10 Mbps retrievals, $300 for 100 Mbps retrievals, etc.

A bit more detail in an older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7147325

There's a few calculators that make it quite simple to figure out restore costs.

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