“We find our hardware can provide useful life for anywhere from 5-10 years depending on what it is and when in the global technology cycle it was bought, meaning we can amortise and depreciate the cost of any hardware over many years.”
A petabyte of backups on Amazon S3 runs $252,000 a year by Fastmail’s math. One 2U server with 24 61TB SSDs costs about $190,000 once, plus roughly $3,000 a year for space and power. Its oldest NVMe drives show 4% wear after years in production. The cloud sells flexibility, and Fastmail has 25 years of data saying it doesn’t need any.