how much is the real estate cost of 625 drives and associated machinery to run it?
At a guess, AWS has an operating margin of about 30%, so you can approximate their cost of hardware, bandwidth, and other fixed costs as 70% of their sticker price. As a start up, can you actually get this price to be lower? I actually dont think you can, unless your operation is very small and can be done out of a home/small office.
Their margin on bandwidth is literally over 1000%. Quick google says that S3 costs 320% more than Backblaze (which, presumably, isn't running at a loss).
> At a guess
The comments in this discussion that try to provide actual numbers show a fairly lopsided argument against S3. The comments that are advocating for S3 aren't as detailed.
You can look at this at the macro level, as on comment did, and see that one 1.2PB RackmountPro 4U server is $11K. Yes, of course you still need space and power. But at least this gives us actual numbers to play with as a base (e.g. buying 10 of these is less than what you'll spend on S3 in a month)
At a miro-level. You can spend $650 on a 16TB hard drive, or $650 on 16TB for 2 months of S3. Now, S3 is battle-tested, has redundancy, has power, has a cpu, has a network card (but not bandwidth), and is managed - unquestionable HUGE wins. But the hard drive (and other equipment) come with a 3-5 year warranty. Now, the difference between $650 for the hard drive, and $12000 for S3 over 3 years, won't let you: get the power, rent the racks, hire the staff, and invest in learning ceph. But the difference between $400K and $5million will.
An empty 4U server with 96+ bays looks like it will set you back ~$7k minimum. At $500 per drive (I have no idea what volume discounts are like) filling it with drives would be in the range of ~$50k. You'd still need RAM. And (as you noted) space and power.
I have no idea how the math ends up working out, but a 1PB appliance in working order is nowhere near as cheap as $11k.
how much is the real estate cost of 625 drives and associated machinery to run it?
At a guess, AWS has an operating margin of about 30%, so you can approximate their cost of hardware, bandwidth, and other fixed costs as 70% of their sticker price. As a start up, can you actually get this price to be lower? I actually dont think you can, unless your operation is very small and can be done out of a home/small office.