Danny's Lab

Engineering the World

Cloud Storage Servers

Published on: Jul 29, 2018
Reading time: 5 minutes

We have an ever increasing amount of personal media content. And these days, being available on the road is almost becoming a requirement. Depending on your needs, a home NAS just may not be sufficient anymore.

With cloud services continuing to provide affordable services, the question for me today is whether it's affordable enough to store all of my media content "in the cloud". By "in the cloud", I really mean just available on the internet from anywhere. For myself, I have several personal git/subversion repositories, photo repositories, and ideally DVDs and other large media. Not counting the DVD's, I'm in need of roughly 200+GB of data. 250-300GB would be ideal to last me a while. However, including DVD content would easily bring me to about 1TB. For solving my immediate needs, I'm aiming for finding a solution to my 250-300GB problem.

The services I've found of late with a brief synopsis of their differences. However this article is primarily focused on cost.

ServiceVirtualizationAnnual Price for ~200GBLocation
BackupsyKVM$120 / 250GBDallas, TX; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; Denver, CO; Buffalo, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Netherlands, UK
VPS Cheap(unknown)$180 / 200GBChicago
BudgetVMOpenVZ$132 / 200GBChicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami
1TB VPS(unknown)$300 / 1TBPhoenix, AZ
Time4VPSOpenVZ$60 / 512GBLithuania, Vilnius
Digital OceanKVM$300 / 200GBNew York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Toronto, Bangalore
VirMachKVM$42 / 500GBBuffalo, NY
LetBoxKVM$42 / 500GBLos Angeles
Impact VPSOpenVZ$144 / 250GBSeattle
BuyVMKVM$84 / 250GBLas Vegas, New Jersey, Luxembourg

Backupsy

Their prices are currently:

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
250GB$10$0.04$120
500GB$20$0.04$240
750GB$30$0.04$360
1000GB$40$0.04$480
1250GB$50$0.04$600
1500GB$60$0.04$720
1750GB$70$0.04$840
2000GB$80$0.04$960

However in contacting their customer support, they do not recommend using it for small random-access files as I would for repositories.

In addition, it is not entirely clear whether it would be within their terms of use. I suspect it would be okay for personal repositories. But group access of regular projects may trigger warnings from them.

VPS Cheap

Their budget prices right now are: Their prices are currently:

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
100GB$7.99$0.0799$96
200GB$14.99$0.07495$180
300GB$29.99$0.09996$360

The price are competitive, but not really "a deal".

BudgetVM

Budget VM's current SSD VPS offerings are:

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
150GB$9.99$0.0666$120
200GB$14.99$0.07495$180
250GB$19.99$0.07996$240
350GB$39.99$0.11425$480
450GB$59.99$0.13331$720

They also have a "Lightning Fast OpenVZ" category (though both categories use OpenVZ):

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
150GB$7.99$0.05326$96
200GB$10.99$0.05495$132
250GB$13.99$0.05596$168
300GB$24.99$0.08330$300
400GB$49.99$0.12497$600

Virtualization Technology: OpenVZ (for both plans listed above) Budget VM's prices are also reasonably competitive. If your only interest is storage, their pricing ends up costing you more per GB as you expand.

1TB VPS

1TBVPS is an interesting player in the space. They offer a no-frills service with little in the way of service/support and less in the way of options. However they make up for it by offering extremely competitive specs and pricing. Their pricing is currently:

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
1 TB$24.99$0.02499$300
2 TB$49.99$0.02499$600

Their parent company is I/O Flood. Neither website makes any mention of their type of virtualization technology. In addition I/O Flood (as of this weekend) has terrible network responsiveness. Their web pages easily take over 10 seconds to load, which does not inspire a lot of confidence.

Time4VPS

Time4VPS looks to be an ideal service if you can be satisfied with a server in Europe/Lithuania/Vilnius.

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
512 GB$4.99$0.00974$60
1024 GB$7.49$0.00731$90
2048 GB$12.49$0.00609$150
4096 GB$22.49$0.00549$270
8192 GB$42.49$0.00518$510

They offer discounts for annual/bi-annual terms. Their pricing is in Euros. The amounts given are adjusted by 1.25 to account for current exchange rates/taxes.

Digital Ocean Block Storage

Digital Ocean Block Storage is a flat rate of $0.10/GB, but also requires a server to be attached to it (starting at $5/mo). They are certainly not as cheap as the other services. However their block storage is expandable, allowing you to easily grow as your needs grow. They have servers around the world. Their block storage offering is available in 100GB increments. A few numbers are given here for comparison purposes:

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
200 GB$25$0.1250$300
500 GB$55$0.1100$660
1000 GB$105$0.1050$1260
2000 GB$205$0.1025$2460

To ensure a somewhat fair comparison, $5/server was included in the above prices.

VirMach

VirMach has a very competitive storage offering:

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
500 GB$3.50$0.007$42
1000 GB$7.00$0.007$84
2000 GB$14.00$0.007$168
4000 GB$28.00$0.007$336

They have some questionable reviews around the net. However, they have been in business since at least 2005, so they are fairly well established.

LetBox

LetBox also has some very competitive pricing for a storage VPS:

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
500 GB$3.50$0.007$42
1000 GB$7.00$0.007$84

Impact VPS

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
250 GB$12.00$0.048$144
500 GB$24.00$0.048$288
750 GB$36.00$0.048$432
1000 GB$48.00$0.048$576
2000 GB$96.00$0.048$1152
3000 GB$144.00$0.048$1728

BuyVM

CapacityPrice/mo$/GB/mo$/year
250 GB$7.00$0.028$84
500 GB$15.00$0.03$180
1000 GB$30.00$0.03$360
2000 GB$60.00$0.03$720

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