REALLY cheap Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage seems to the in thing these days. With the launch of Google Drive, my previous post on how to create a site to share large files seem a bit irrelevant, and with the even hotter news that Google and Microsoft may launch their own IaaS initiatives to compete with Amazon it looks a foregone conclusion that cloud storage will become ridiculously cheap in the years to come. So cheap in fact, it may make the large Hard Disk in your home seem as irrelevant as my post.

Now, although Cloud Storage is cheap and can only get cheaper, I am — by all accounts– the cheapest cheap skate I know, and I’m always ready to try a new deal even when the new deal is just $0.03 less than the old deal.

That’s right, there’s a cloud storage provider that offers storage and bandwidth cost for as much as 3 cents/GB less than even Amazon. 3 cents, might not seem a lot, till you realize the price per GB is just 9 cents, meaning that 3 cents less is a 33% discount. That’s a lot, and the fact that it includes Bandwidth means that its definitely worth a try.

Nimbus.io is currenty in Beta mode, but it promises storage cost of just $0.06/GB which is a full 3 cents per GB cheaper than Amazon S3, and it’s bandwidth charges are nothing to scoff at either. While Amazon charges a full $0.12/GB of outward bandwith, Nimbus charges just $0.06/GB. That’s a 50% discount on Amazon–and here I was thinking Amazon was the cheapest.

Nimbus attribute their cheap storage cost to a totally different cloud architecture :

Architecture

Nimbus.io uses parity striping to spread data across many servers redundantly – providing bulk storage with equal reliability and less than half the overhead of replication based storage systems.

Now while it doesn’t have the scale of AWS or the pockets of Google and Microsoft, it does have a cloud architecture geared towards a cheaper storage cost, at the expense though of latency. So if latency is an issue, you might want to reconsider, but for most of us, especially if you’re just storing your wedding photos and videos, there really isn’t a need to have a high performing low latency server, that you’ll be paying 33% more for.

Currently it’s in beta mode, but I sure as hell can’t wait for the launch. I’ve actually registered for a trial and hopefully get my hands on it soon.