The Price of the Cloud

This is the $5000 Fleur Burger. It costs $5000. For the burger. Some call it the “Traditional Cloud Datacenter of All Burgers.”

Space Monkey just completed a very successful Kickstarter Campaign, raising almost $350K in just 30 days. With that $350K, we’re going to provide 1TB of storage to almost 3000 users for more than a year (and for some even longer). But how much storage could $350K buy in the traditional cloud?

Using the cheapest tiered pricing at Amazon’s S3 ($0.055/GB/month), $350K could buy 1TB of space for 3000 users for just over 60 days. After two months the money would be gone. All of it.

If you were a rich man, maybe you wouldn’t care that the datacenter-backed cloud was so inefficient and expensive — if you were a wealthy man.

But that’s just the price for the storage. Factoring in the per-op charges for getting data in and out and the bandwidth charges that are levied on top of the raw storage costs, that number can quickly fall to under 1 month.

Dropbox stores all customer data on Amazon’s S3. So do many of its competitors. Google Drive and Microsoft’s Skydrive have their own datacenter operations, but their internal costs aren’t much better. Datacenters are inherently expensive to build and operate, and the only way to really fix that is to bypass them entirely.

Originally published on June 19th, 2013 by @alenp