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>> No. 26617 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 6:35 pm
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Dropbox's free 2GB seems too small to store my online videos so I looked into paying for an upgrade. Their Dropbox Plus package includes 1TB - good stuff - for £79.99 a year.

What the fuck? That's silly money. I could buy a 1TB+ external hard drive for less than half of that and keep it forever. But they want to charge me that much to just rent one?

How can the cloud storage services justify these prices? Technology companies must be able to buy storage at massive bulk discounts.
Expand all images.
>> No. 26619 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 6:59 pm
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>>26617
You're not paying for the drive - you're paying for a drive to be connected to the internet in a secure data centre with 2n redundancy, a load of bandwidth, APIs, a cute front end and a load of geeks to run it 24x7x365. You cannot do that yourself for 79 quid per year.

Sage for rank stupidity.
>> No. 26620 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 7:01 pm
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>How can the cloud storage services justify these prices?

Because if you buy an external hard drive your data is only as safe as the hard drive is, I wouldn't even count it as backup if it's in the same place as your computer. You can't share it with other people easily, either.

They're also charging you, what, 20p a day to store your data? That doesn't seem expensive to me, honestly, especially when you factor in the additional functionality of a dedicated cloud platform versus, say, keeping something at your local datacentre or even hiring an FTP server somewhere, both of which tend to be more expensive than Dropbox anyway. It's about 0.08p per GB, assuming you use the full TB.

AWS S3 charges about 0.02p per GB per month, so it's not really a bad deal. The cheapest thing you could do is S3 Glacier but I don't know if that'd be enough access for you.
>> No. 26621 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 7:33 pm
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My bank charges £300 a year for a safe deposit box. What the fuck? That's silly money. I could buy a metal box for a tenner and keep it forever. But they want to charge me that much just to rent one?

How can the banks justify these prices? Banks must be able to buy metal boxes at massive bulk discounts.
>> No. 26622 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 7:41 pm
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>>26617

>How can the cloud storage services justify these prices? Technology companies must be able to buy storage at massive bulk discounts.

AWS cloud, lad. Much easier for software houses to deliver products on demand. Cloud not used for storage but more beneficial way to provide on demand data. Means Amazon will rule the world in about 5 years imo tho as they will scrape all the data for their nefarious needs (like they do for businesses).
>> No. 26623 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 8:04 pm
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>>26619
>a load of bandwidth, APIs, a cute front end and a load of geeks to run it 24x7x365
This stuff is pretty much free. Once the software infrastructure is built, it doesn't require much maintenance, and I'd be surprised if Amazon pay for haulage. If everything is well built, then the team won't need to scale.

You are literally just paying for storage. Commodity storage is cheap, enterprise grade storage not so much. It's around 2-3x more expensive before the multipliers. At the job I've just left, taking into account the device and geographic redundancy as well as the backups, providing 1TB usable required around 24TB physical.
>> No. 26624 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 8:05 pm
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>>26619
When you pay a subscription to Dropbox, you're also paying for probably another hundred people using the free version.
>> No. 26625 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 8:45 pm
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>>26624

>you're also paying for probably another hundred people using the free version

The socialist utopia defined in a sentence
>> No. 26626 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 8:50 pm
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>>26624
But it's a stupid business model because there's no scaling for people like me. I'm prepared to pay a little extra for a little more. But it's either free and inconvenient, or £80 a year. So free it has to be.
>> No. 26627 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 9:00 pm
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If it's so cheap, why isn't someone out there charging £20 a year and destroying the competition?
>> No. 26628 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 9:12 pm
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>>26623 you are literally just paying for storage.

And some tolerable software that keeps my fleet of machines synchronised pretty well, with selective folders on selective machines, and a decent attempt at resynchronising when laptops get back on the net. Also packrat option, where every file version is saved forever, which has saved my arse a couple of times.
Low learning curve, high functionality, decent reliability.
I wish LAN Sync ran at line rate, and wish I could apply rules for filenames that I don't want to sync (my PCB package produces a prodigious quantity of backups which don't really deserve to be duplicated) but other than that, they're very welcome to my money.
>> No. 26629 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 9:31 pm
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>>26628
This "not reading the post before replying to it" thing is getting really tiresome.
>> No. 26630 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 9:53 pm
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>>26629
You mean I didn't take any notice of the bit where it said that software development, infrastructure and bandwidth was free? That's because it's bollocks, too.
If I wanted to pay for storage, I'd pay for storage, Dropbox ain't that, and it's a distinction worth drawing.
Or am I missing some greater point? Could be, been a long day.
>> No. 26631 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 9:55 pm
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I see a cunt-off on the horizon.............
>> No. 26632 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 10:04 pm
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>>26622

Dropbox completely migrated off AWS in 2016. It took two years and involved building three 40MW DCs, but they saved $75m a year by doing so.

>>26623

>This stuff is pretty much free.

Bollocks.

https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/static-files/b51002ef-aca2-4956-a4f9-fa10fd656d58

>>26624

>When you pay a subscription to Dropbox, you're also paying for probably another hundred people using the free version.

It's cheaper than advertising. Freemium is not a new idea in SaaS; it has worked outrageously well for Dropbox.

>>26626

>But it's a stupid business model

Dropbox is worth $13.5bn. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

>>26629

This is a very old, very boring argument.

The software is the value. You can literally just pay for storage from any number of other providers. Consumers choose to pay for Dropbox because the software is exceptionally good at zero-effort file syncing. Some very clever people built a very good product, which allows them to charge a premium over commodity storage. Paying for convenience is not stupid. The real world does not operate on cost-plus pricing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod
>> No. 26633 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 10:09 pm
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>>26632

>You can literally just pay for storage from any number of other providers.

Who would you recommend?
>> No. 26634 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 10:13 pm
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OP, a hard drive will not last forever, I'd give it ten years max before it fails. Always keep extra backups.

>>26621
This post made me laugh.
>> No. 26635 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 10:20 pm
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>>26630
>You mean I didn't take any notice of the bit where it said that software development, infrastructure and bandwidth was free? That's because it's bollocks, too.
Yes, it does often seem that way to people who have no idea what they're talking about.
>> No. 26636 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 11:09 pm
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>>26631
I see trouble on the way
>> No. 26637 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 11:21 pm
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>>26630
>You mean I didn't take any notice of the bit where it said that software development, infrastructure and bandwidth was free? That's because it's bollocks, too.
It really isn't.

Let's break this down for the mouth-breathers in the room, such as >>26632, who for some inexplicable reason thought an SEC filing was somehow relevant to how fixed and variable costs work.

Let's say you have a product that takes around 25 man-years to build. How much does it cost you to build that for a few hundred users? Around £1m. How much does it cost you to build the same product for millions of users? Around £1m. How much extra did all those extra users cost? Nothing. What was the marginal cost of development? Zero.

Let's turn to the software infrastructure - tooling, pipelines, etc. Hopefully I shouldn't have to explain why the number of users has no bearing on the cost of building internal tools that they never interact with.

Bandwidth is counter-intuitive. You'd think that the more you use, the more it would cost you. In reality, large network operators work on a peering basis, where the cost of having other networks carry your traffic is to carry their traffic in your network in return. Once you scale to the point of having enough network traffic to warrant it, you'd be a mug not to join an exchange and get peering. Transfer fees go out the window and you just pay towards the exchange. Out with a variable cost, in with a fixed one.

In short, in terms of the business costs that are passed on to the consumer, the only thing that actually scales with usage is the resources supporting it. For a business selling cloud storage, that's ... well, storage. As has already been explained, when you're paying an extra fee for more storage, what you're paying for is in effect that storage and nothing else, regardless of whatever other features come with it, because providing those things are effectively free. From the perspective of the business, they're already paid for.

The main reason why these prices may seem a bit high to the man on the street is that in order to support your 1TB plan, the provider has to provision about 20-30 times that. The comparison to a 1TB hard disk is useless. To get the same sort of resilience that the likes of Amazon, Dropbox, Backblaze, etc. provide on your 1TB of storage, you're going to have to buy dozens of those drives.
>> No. 26638 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 11:34 pm
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>>26637
>The comparison to a 1TB hard disk is useless. To get the same sort of resilience that the likes of Amazon, Dropbox, Backblaze, etc. provide on your 1TB of storage, you're going to have to buy dozens of those drives.

Lots of people in lots of use cases don't need that level of resilience, or any of the other features cloud storage offers. For them the comparison isn't useless.
>> No. 26639 Anonymous
23rd June 2018
Saturday 11:55 pm
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>>26638
If you genuinely aren't fussed about your data randomly going bye-bye one morning then why worry at all? Just spread it across various Rapidshare uploads, bookmark the resulting links, and let the chips fall where they fall may.
>> No. 26640 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 12:12 am
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>>26638
No, I mean comparing them as alternatives is useless. Cloud storage and portable storage are different products with different features and benefits for different use cases.
>> No. 26641 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 12:32 am
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>>26617

>I could buy a 1TB+ external hard drive for less than half of that and keep it forever.

At least until it randomly decides to go on a tea break and never come back. I once had a portable drive die while I was preparing the NAS box I was going to migrate everything to. As in, 10am it's working, 6pm it's completely unreadable. In general, I tend to have really shitty luck with things failing right in the middle of upgrades. Imagine going into hospital to have your appendix removed only for the fucker to rupture while you're counting backwards.
>> No. 26642 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 12:54 am
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>>26641

>Imagine going into hospital to have your appendix removed only for the fucker to rupture while you're counting backwards.

Hey, that happened to me, more or less. They had to stick a metal tube in my abdomen and suck out all the infection the day after the operation, then when that didn't work they had to cut me back open again and then they had to stick two more metal tubes in me while I was awake. On the back of that, I highly recommend paying Dropbox their eighty quid.
>> No. 26643 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 10:28 pm
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>>26634
>I'd give it ten years max before it fails
I didn't literally mean forever, but this misses the point - in that time I would have saved three-quarters of a grand compared to keeping the data in the cloud.
>> No. 26644 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 10:40 pm
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OK here's a question then - web hosting presumably has to provide a lot more services on top of data storage. So why is it cheaper? It says right there, unlimited storage, and all this other shit, for a fraction of the price Dropbox want to charge me.
>> No. 26646 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 10:56 pm
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>>26643
Think of it as the lottery in reverse. Instead of paying two quid to win a million, imagine not paying two quid to not lose a million. If you can afford to lose the data then it's not important, so why not save yourself £60 by not bothering? Unless you're specifically using it to transport more data than would be feasible to ship over a network, in which case the portable is much better suited. As the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of mag tapes.

>>26644
It's only unlimited subject to Rule 7. Try uploading your entire 20TB of pigeon prolapse rimming porn and see what they say. You're also not paying for the redundancy because bargain-basement hosting typically doesn't provide any sort of SLA. If the disk your data is on dies, it's gone.
>> No. 26647 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 10:59 pm
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>>26644
Because what dropbox sell is storage wrapped up with their software. The software is, to their customers, worth paying for.
I couldn't begin to write or maintain my own for £80 a year, and it's not something I care to do.
As matey up there points out, dropbox are raking it in because millions of people think like me, but dropbox don't need to write a new pile of software for every customer. They're happy, I'm happy.
If you want hosting, dropbox would be a pretty crappy solution. If you want file synchronisation / sharing, dropbox may be worth the money.
>> No. 26648 Anonymous
24th June 2018
Sunday 11:12 pm
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>>26644
>web hosting presumably has to provide a lot more services on top of data storage
Services like offering 100 other people a shell to the same machine on which your data is stored? A privilege escalation attack gets leaked and your data is now their data. It's not just other customers you have to worry about because many of them will inevitably be running unpatched PHP.

It doesn't make sense to suggest that offering more services costs them more. All of their software stack will be off the shelf and most of it free. Dropbox is creating a bespoke solution to do a single job well, not leveraging FOSS to offer a passable product as cheaply as possible.

Surely you know better than to believe a seller offering unlimited benefits for a finite price (and a bargain basement one at that). Perhaps there are no limits because there's only a 40 GB HDD mounted to your account, a 10 Mbps uplink, or more likely they'd just hide behind an AUP.

Also that plan is actually $7.46/month right now and only then if you pay for the whole year.
>> No. 26649 Anonymous
25th June 2018
Monday 12:27 am
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>>26648

With cheap hosting, it's all about contention. They cram thousands of customers onto each of their cheapo servers. It looks OK if you don't run any stress tests, but it keels over if you hit it with any sort of traffic.

The "unlimited" claims are basically bollocks. Their Acceptable Use Policy invariably includes some weasely statement like "Any activity that results in usage inconsistent with normal usage patterns may result in the suspension of your account", meaning that anyone who isn't running a small website with a tiny trickle of traffic instantly gets their account frozen.
>> No. 26650 Anonymous
26th June 2018
Tuesday 3:06 am
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>>26648
> Services like offering 100 other people a shell to the same machine on which your data is stored? A privilege escalation attack gets leaked and your data is now their data. It's not just other customers you have to worry about because many of them will inevitably be running unpatched PHP.

AWS and Azure have essentially the same problem, you're renting virtual machines running on VMWare, Xen, or HyperV. The bar is higher but no means unsurmountable.
>> No. 26652 Anonymous
28th June 2018
Thursday 1:20 am
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The things that cost long term money in a DC these days are... well, just the one thing: power. I'll include AC in that, since higher density racks require more cooling and more power and hence command higher prices. That's just for commercial hosting, but similar things apply to dedicated DCs. Power is king. At the high end, company A can't build a new DC in desirable peering spot X because company B already bought all the power. If power is king, bandwidth is that annoying jester that has the kings ear. This is all before we get into hardware choices and the software stack to provide the storage.

The economics for each provider differ depending on their business focus, but in short: go with external storage x2 if you care but not that much. It'll be cheaper and better long term storage than cloud. But if you want it synced across "devices" and such either pay your tithe to the data gods or roll your own redundant storage... good luck with that.
>> No. 26653 Anonymous
28th June 2018
Thursday 6:18 pm
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It's pretty easy to setup your own ftp server. I don't see the appeal of the cloud really. In fact I might set up one when I get home, save me from cloning my files onto separate devices. I'm used to not always have a net connection though.
>> No. 26655 Anonymous
28th June 2018
Thursday 6:41 pm
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>>26653
It's pretty easy to set up a vastly inferior solution? Yeah, no shit. We've already had this conversation though.
>> No. 26656 Anonymous
28th June 2018
Thursday 7:00 pm
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>>26653

I would rather surrender my first born son to Dropbox than to ever have to stare at the agonisingly slow download bar while trying to transfer something off the NAS in my shed while I'm sat in a hotel 300 miles away, only for something to go wrong and have to start over gain.
>> No. 26657 Anonymous
30th June 2018
Saturday 5:05 pm
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I'm gonna try these guys:

https://hubic.com/en/

I think they give you 25GB free and it works on RasPi too.
>> No. 26658 Anonymous
30th June 2018
Saturday 5:37 pm
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>>26657
No you ain't. Their note explaining why they stopped taking on new customers speaks a bit to the "well a 1 TB HDD only costs X" geniuses above.
>> No. 26659 Anonymous
30th June 2018
Saturday 10:35 pm
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>>26658
I was going to ask what you were on about, until I actually clicked on the "Get it" buttons. For what is supposed to be a legit company continuing to advertise and offer a service you aren't selling is shady as fuck.
>> No. 26660 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 9:33 am
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>>26658
It says their service to the public diverges too much from their core business of service to other firms, and that market is too competitive for them to continue in it.

So nothing, in fact, that is related to what's been discussed in this thread about the proportionate costs of technology.
>> No. 26661 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 11:00 am
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>>26660
>So nothing, in fact, that is related to what's been discussed in this thread about the proportionate costs of technology.

Few businesses will give up a cash-cow without very good reasons, hence there is a strong implication that either their margins are very tight or it's even being ran at a loss.
In the early days of this service, it's likely that the costs weren't fully account for as they were being absorbed into the overheads of the core business.
>> No. 26662 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 3:50 pm
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>>26660

>a service like hubiC does not rely on its storage technologies alone; there are a range of other aspects that need to be updated and monitored. Even though these other aspects fell outside our core business, we continued to develop them.

>Over the years, and as the market became more and more competitive, the specifications needed for developing a solution for the general public gradually got longer and longer, and started to diverge more and more from the updates and features needed and in demand for our professional solutions.

>The business of OVH is providing cloud solutions for developers, IT companies and professionals in all sectors of activity. We need to focus on our core business to consolidate our very rapid growth in Europe and the United States.

That's the exact point made by >>26619, >>26628 and >>26632 - services like Dropbox involve much more than just hard drives in a rack. Developing, maintaining and supporting the software for a consumer file sync or backup product incurs a substantial cost above and beyond the cost of boxes in a rack. OVH stopped accepting new signups for Hubic because they want to concentrate on the business of renting boxes in a rack, rather than the business of maintaining a software product.

If, as >>26623 argues, "that stuff is pretty much free" and "you're literally just paying for storage", then OVH would still be offering this service. OVH's statement directly contradicts that argument - they said nothing about the costs of storage, only the costs of maintaining a consumer software product.
>> No. 26663 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 3:51 pm
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>>26660

>It says their service to the public diverges too much from their core business of service to other firms

"This data storage lark is making us too much money, so we'll stop it right now to focus on our previous work instead of pivoting or expanding the business!"

>and that market is too competitive for them to continue in it.

What happened to it being so easy and cheap to provide data storage that anyone should be able to do it for far cheaper than DropBox? That'd be a great way to be competitive.
>> No. 26664 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 5:02 pm
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>>26662
>If, as >>26623 argues, "that stuff is pretty much free" and "you're literally just paying for storage", then OVH would still be offering this service
Lad, that's bollocks and you know it.
>> No. 26665 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 5:09 pm
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>>26664

If I had a service that was 'pretty much free' to run, and I was charging a bit of money for it, I'd probably not stop offering that service.
>> No. 26666 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 5:35 pm
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>>26665
You might not stop offering it, but then again you're not a top 10 hosting company, so I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that they know their business better than you do. There are plenty of potential explanations for them pulling the plug. If you wanted to just focus on numbers, the straightforward explanation for closing it to new customers while continuing to service existing customers indefinitely would be the marginal cost of new customers, which is made up almost entirely of the physical resources underlying it - hardware and power.

As I said, they know their business better than we do, but if I had to speculate at the reason for doing it, I'd guess that either it's profitable but not sufficiently so, it's someone's pet project and they've moved on, or they believe it's cannibalising the market for the storage part of their primary cloud offering.
>> No. 26667 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 6:06 pm
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>>26666

Or that it's expensive to run.
>> No. 26668 Anonymous
1st July 2018
Sunday 6:23 pm
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>>26667
Because if it's too expensive to run the ideal solution is to keep running the service and just close it to new customers.

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