Ask HN: $0.10/GB/Month for storage, unlimited free bandwidth. Interested?
I'm highly considering starting a cloud storage company, with an offering similar to Amazon S3 with a lower price per GB for storage and unlimited free bandwidth.
In terms of background, I am a software developer who has been building high end servers for nearly 10 years. I've assembled a team of engineers who understand the complexity of managing petabytes of data.
As a team, we have spent the last three months developing a server strategy that is scalable and supports very fast transfer speeds. Nearly every component within the server has redundancy. Because we are building the servers ourselves, we can afford to replicate any uploaded data over three servers.
We have developed a partnership with a high-end datacenter management company in Montreal to provide the colocation and bandwidth. Their partnership has allowed us a dedicated 1000megabit line to each rack, and can pool this bandwidth to allow an overall connection of a few gigabits per second.
Our server design and the partnership created allows us to have an overall design that allows for triple redundancy across a few datacenters as well as very fast access speeds.
We can profitably offer this at $0.10 per GB stored without ever charging for bandwidth.
Fully understanding the brand name appeal of Amazon and Rackspace, is there room for a new entrant in the cloud storage market?
Is having the datacenters in Canada an issue?
Looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say.
JB There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. You can get away with claiming that to n00bs. But folks that really need a lot of bandwidth may actually feel more comfortable if you say you will provide them with 100MBPS solid BW than "unlimited". There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth Maybe there is a hidden cost, such as charging per request. How do you convince people you are going to be as reliable over a span of years as the big name companies? (The mere act of conducting this kind of informal market research is a clue that you may not be -- your interest in the market is tentative. And making claims that could fail if tested -- 'unlimited bandwidth' -- similarly suggests unseriousness.) Having buy-in at launch from major companies on multi-year deals could address these concerns by sending strong signals of viability and social proof. Isn't the pitfall here that someone could store a 1 gigabyte file on your service and then transfer 5000 gigabytes a month. At the end of the month you collect your 10 cents. I'd be very wary of assuming zero bandwidth cost in your business model. Yes you have a partnership right now. But partnerships are made and broken all the time. What are the chances you can get another partnership for free bandwidth if the current one fails? That's a good question. You're right, the cost of bandwidth is not zero. The partnership allowed us to get a good price on a dedicated 1000mbps line with unlimited use as a fixed monthly cost. Because we aren't paying per GB of transfer, we can pass this savings along to the customer. If your total bandwidth is 1000mbps, it is far from "unlimited". I ran a somewhat popular site that req'd 200mbps. Your offer seems ideal and could save me lots of money. Until I consider that longterm your model is very unsustainable and you'd probably hate sites like mine...which brings me to my point...you might as well think more about what segment of users you want to target and have an offer that addresses their needs and concerns. Do you want to be most like hostgator or softlayer or amazon S3? They all serve very different profile of customers and have different paths to longterm sustainability. I have to agree with the others about bandwidth. I run a high-traffic gallery that hosts user-generated images. Our gallery has about 300 GB of images, but we move over 130 TB of bandwidth per month. If I moved my site to your service would you still be making a profit at $30/month? Free is overrated. Pay attention to SLA vs. Cost . The most important deciding factor is going to be your terms of your SLA vs. you price. And finally, your API . AWS wins by providing a simple API that make routine tasks easy to execute. It sounds interesting but storage has no real relationship with bandwidth. That imgur site has 11 gigabytes of images - $1,100 per month - and it's serving 10 terabytes a day of traffic. What happens if the next imgur signs up? Oops actually $1.10, not $1,100. > and can pool this bandwidth to allow an overall connection of a few gigabits per second. How do you prevent one customer from hogging all the available upstream bandwidth? Why don't you start an online backup service (that is reasonably priced)? I've always wanted to use one, but they are so expensive, when really you should mostly just be renting hard drive space, as bandwidth usage is generally minimal (backup is done once, and then sits there forever and is never even re-downloaded 99% of the time). I think there is definitely room in the market. I myself would not have an issue with it being in Canada, and for some, it might even be a plus. How exactly could the files on your storage be accessed? I assume http ? Just as a note, you will be horrifically raped if you try to offer "unlimited free bandwidth." Raped like never imagined you could be raped.