I've actually looked at that before if I was wanting to a large restore if my home nas just totally crashed. .03c is still going to cost like $1000 which still is pretty steep. Mostly because you know these devices aren't being plugged in and the data extracted from s3 over the WAN, they are likely plugged in directly in the datacenter over some insane internal high-speed link.
Yeah, it depends on use case. For business use cases in the event of a big issue / local data loss - $1,000 range might be a rounding error - that's def who they are targeting.
For 40 TB range stuff I've benchmarked some of the free / unlimited options and I'm not sure you could really get data back out and local that efficiently? It's still a week with AWS though as well.
One note - ingress to AWS is free - so if your job model is mostly writing into AWS, with a once every 5 years extract - the overall cost per GB transferred may not be that bad.
rsync.net is 2 cents per GB/month.
AWS glacier and deep glacier are .4 and .1 cents per GB/month.
Free ingress.
40TB on AWS + ingress = $40/month.
A lot of the "outrage" on HN around AWS pricing is not necessarily looking at total costs of solutions AWS offers.
The other things - AWS offers fully transparent pricing.
Even folks like cloudflare - folks say it's an unlimited CDN for $200/month. No it's not.
"Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited."
For business - they like the clarity / simplicity of AWS. For bigger data you can backup locally and have your offsite be AWS - hopefully never to use it or pay the ship out expense.
