Hey everyone! I'm currently assisting a small nonprofit in Canada that wants to upgrade their tech and make use of available grants. We're looking into cloud storage options for backups and trying to figure out Amazon's offerings. I've seen that TechSoup mentions we can get $1,000 in credits for AWS services, but when I looked into S3 storage costs, it seemed pretty complicated. There are different types of storage based on how often we need to access our data, which makes it tricky to figure out how much we can get with that credit. For example, if we need around 5 TB of online storage, will that credit cover our needs? Also, is there any cloud storage we can access through Amazon's free tier? Your help with some clarity on these points would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
Your storage costs mainly depend on how you plan to use the data. If you don’t need quick access, the cheapest option is Amazon’s Glacier Deep Archive at about $1/TB/month, which totals up to $60/year for 5 TB. But just remember, restoring data could take hours! If you need faster retrieval, you might want to look at other tiers, but they come at a higher cost.
When it comes to AWS, understanding how to manage your account is super important, especially if you’re new to it. Don't overlook aspects like securing credentials, setting budget alerts, and other preliminary best practices before diving into using S3 for backups. The risk of running up a huge bill can be larger than the benefits of that $1K grant, so make sure you're prepared!
Absolutely! It’s crucial to get a good grasp of these foundational concepts first. I’ve seen stories where people ended up with massive bills because they didn't monitor their usage properly.
Right! Also, it’s worth noting that if you need to scale up frequently, it might be smarter to consider which storage tier to use based on your actual retrieval needs.