Why Amazon may no longer be your best option for cloud storage.

Right now, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google are the giants of cloud storage. Many household names don't have their own cloud storage but use one of these three to store their data in the cloud. Facebook is one of the few who does have its very own data centres. No-one knows for sure exactly how much storage in the cloud these companies have but one thing we can be sure of, it's increasing all the time. 

Instead of measuring this vast data storage in terms of terabytes, it is measured in petabytes he prefix peta indicates the fifth power of 1000 and means 10 to power 15 in the International System of Units. To get your head around such a huge number, here it is in terms of something we are more familiar with. A single PB (petabyte) would take over 745 million floppy disks or 1.5 million CD-ROM discs!

To store such massive amounts of data these companies are continuously (almost) opening new data storage centres with more than 30,000 square metres. Imagine the electricity used to cool all those storage devices and don't forget, they will back everything up on multiple servers around the world with massive redundancy built-in. They can't afford to lose any data so they have to have continually replace hard drives before they fail. I wonder what happens to all those redundant drives - do they get sold of do they destroy them and recycle the waste?

So, why am I telling you all this very interesting stuff (I am a bit of a geek so forgive me)? Well today I got a message from Amazon - check out the screenshot above. Basically it tells me that Amazon will no longer let me have unlimited storage but I can buy storage on their servers in blocks of 1 Terabyte up to a maximum of 30TB, if I understand them correctly. For each TB they will charge me £79.99. I make that £2,399.70 per year!

Obviously, I am not going to need that much storage! Imagine though that I did, say I was a filmmaker who needed to store backups off-site of all my videos (filmed in 4K of course). What would the alternative be? well, let's try and see.

First option would be to switch from Amazon to Microsoft or Google or Facebook. Lets see what Microsoft has to offer on it's Azure platform. Well, it's not easy finding out but here is what I found on their site.

So, the price for 30TB would be seem to be £519 monthly (not sure but educated guess - can't see where it says monthly or annually!). Not happy with that I checked again and found another page on their web site that has a handy calculator with a confusing set of options! I typed in 30TB and it gave, after adding lots of other necessary options, a price of £474.04 per month! So, on that basis 30TB of cloud storage from Microsoft would cost me £5,688.48! That is more than double Amazon but I am unclear what the actual difference between the two is to maybe justify that difference. Certainly if you visit Microsoft Azure calculator you will see lots of options. 

These include:

• Charges for write operations: 100,000 x £0.037 per 10,000 operations for 37p!
• List and Create Container Operations: 100,000 x £0.037 per 10,000 operations for another 37p!
• Read operations: 100,000 x £0.003 per 10,000 for 3p!

However, I noticed that they only included of 100GB of data retrieval and 100GB data writes per month for free. If you needed to upload are your whole data of 30TB at once then for that they would charge you nothing extra it seems but there are other charges that are added and so the total price would be £481.75 per month!

Moving onto Google, what could we expect to pay? Well finding the info and actually understanding it was much easier than with Microsoft Azure! For 30TB they would charge the grand sum of £239.00 per month. I make that £2,879.88 per annum. That is marginally above the quote from Amazon.

Finally, is it possible to use Facebook for cloud storage? Well, I couldn't find out if they do offer cloud storage like the others. They certainly store your images and videos for free and to be clear, Amazon will still offer you unlimited storage for your photos as long as you are a Prime account customer.

So, if you really do need up to 30TB of cloud storage it looks like Amazon is till your best bet if you are a Prime customer as all your data can be stored by one company. If you don't like relying on just one company then have a Prime account, get unlimited storage of your images (Jpeg only it seems and no videos) and store your other files with Google or maybe a reseller.

Either way, you should have backups of your data somewhere else too that isn't on the cloud. Real pros who need lots of storage should have an-house RAID array and then a backup off site.

So, I have touched on some aspects of cloud storage if you are in the market for 30TB of storage. What if your needs are more modest, who provides the best solution. Well, as this blog is mostly about photography I will focus (pun intended!) on cloud storage plans for the photographer. Let us say we are looking for no more than 3TB of space, who offers the most competitive deal? Well, let's take my current position as a starting point. I was motivated to write this post because of that email from Amazon. Here is the detailed version:

As you can see, my current plan runs out on 28th Oct 2018, so I have a while before it actually comes to an end and the new pricing applies. At the moment I pay $59.99 per year for unlimited storage. In 2018 I will have to start paying under the new system.  

So, currently I am using 242 GB of which most files consist of photos (237 GB) and the rest is made up of videos (4.55 GB) and 155 individual files (667 MB). So, 3TB of space would be more than enough for my current needs.

According to Amazon's Drive Plans page 1TB costs £79.99(1 Year), 2TB costs £159.98(1 Year) and 3TB costs £239.97(1 Year). Of course, if I actually did need 30TB it would cost me £2,399.70(1 Year), ouch!

So, let's see what Google drive costs. Well, the first thing to note is that you get 15 GB of free storage to use across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. However, we are interested in larger amounts of storage. On their Google Drive Plans page they show prices for 1TB (£7.99 per month), 2TB (£15.99 per month) and 10TB (£79.99 per month) but nothing in between 2TB and 10TB oddly. If you pay for a year in advance, 1TB costs £79.99 per year (a saving of 17%). So, paying advance means your 1TB costs the same as if you had gone with Amazon.

What about Microsoft? Well, for our more modest needs it is competitive. For 
Office 365 Personal with Premium OneDrive Features you get 1TB for $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year, a saving of $13.89. The deal also includes Office 365 so you get full versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote on your phone, tablet and computer. You can install on one pc or Mac, one tablet and one phone. They do have a plan for up to 5 people (say in a family or small organisation) which gives each person 1TB of storage etc. That would cost you $99.99 per year or $9.99 per month. For all the details check out their pricing page.

So, to sum up the offerings from the big three:

Amazon offers 3TB for £239.97 per year whilst Google offers 3TB for... oh, I forgot, they don't do 3TB, only 1TB, 2TB or 10TB and above! Microsoft don't offer 3TB either, it's just 1TB for $69.99 a year (around £52.13 at moment) but they don't do 3TB, only 5 x 1TB for 5 people on one account. What is wrong with these people?

Just before I wrap this post up let's see what other offerings out there, say with a hosting company who do 3TB of storage or some other cloud storage company like Backblaze.

Well, Dropbox offer 1TB for £6.58 per month, 2TB for £10 per month for 3 users and they do offer unlimited for just £15 per month... surely there is some mistake? Well what do you know, there is a catch!  The 2TB is £10 per user per month, starting with 3 users. So, it's actually £30 per month for 2TB! Likewise, the unlimited is for £15 per user per month and starts with 3 users so it's actually £45 per month for 2TB!

No wonder it is all so confusing! Do they deliberately set out to confuse us? I thought they believe the customer is always right?

Well, let's see what Backblaze offer. I use them and have done for a few years now. According to my profile I have 1,864,901 files / 2,471,103 MB backed up! I am on the unlimited plan and have almost 2.5TB stored with them. So, you are no doubt wondering how much this unlimited storage costs aren't you? Well, it is a very reasonable $5.00 per month... yep just $5.00!

How do I get this you ask... well head on over to their site here. By using this link you will get a free month!