On one hand cloud services offer convenienceĪbsolutely, I think when it comes to large data, nothing beats local storage. To put it in a nutshell, if your data does not pay for itself, self hosting is the cheaper way to go. From my calculations, depending on the service you compare to, a enthusiast breaks even after a year or two compared with commercial storage services. Storing that same amount of data in AWS’s S3 Glacier Deep Archive, their cheapest storage tier, would amount to 100USD a month, not to mention that an restore of the entire dataset would cost well north of 4000USD.Įven smaller providers, who historically offered bare metal servers or VPS servers, are usually well above 300USD a month for that amount of storage. Those companies have comparable expenses for hardware and electric energy, but also factor in an overhead for human workforce and a profit margin.Ī simple example is cloud storage, a Toshiba 16TB HDD can be had currently for around 170USD, eight of those driver for a RAID-Z2 or RAID6 with approximately 96TB of storage space* would amount to about 1400USD, with an entire offsite backup of the same specification it would be about 2800USD total. In terms of NAS and self-hosting it means running those services yourself will almost always be more cost efficient than to buy into a managed cloud service.

Not to mention that all cloud providers I know of follow a for profit business model.

On one hand cloud services offer convenience, on the other hand companies cash in on customers of those managed services.

Syncthing aws s3