[JepZ]

Recently I have become a fan of the Hetzner Cloud:

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us

I don't know how competitive their prices are, but I like their easy to use interface which is complemented by and also easy to use API.

Adding a 7-day automatic backup history is just a matter of about two clicks, and the additional costs seem reasonable to me.

[gregmac]

Nightly backups still mean you can lose up to ~24 hours of data.

This is in stark contrast to, for example, AWS S3. From the FAQ [0]:

> Amazon S3 [is] designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years.

> Amazon S3 ... storage classes redundantly store your objects on multiple devices across a minimum of three Availability Zones (AZs) in an Amazon S3 Region before returning SUCCESS.

In AWS parlance, an AZ is a physical data center, and they're built far enough apart so a fire, flood or tornado will not affect all of them.

There's a reason S3 (and similar) cost so much more than "hard drive attached to a server" storage. If you don't need the durability than of course it is overpriced -- but on the other hand, if you try to provide that level of durability yourself you'll quickly see it's a bargain.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#Durability_.26_Data_Protecti...

[JepZ]

Well, you are comparing apples and oranges here. The equivalent AWS service would be EC2 and not S3. I know that you didn't start with that (as gprasanth put them in the same race), but it should be clear those two have different redundancy levels.

In fact, I don't know where AWS nor Hetzner stores the 'disk' of the VPS or even the backups. And while those are undoubtedly essential attributes for enterprise-level services, I think especially for side projects the usability of the service is quite relevant.