So how long until people realize you can just as effectively add more volumes to an Amazon EC2 instance than buying harddrives. 
This type of mining is ripe for abuse until storage providers adjust their pricing models. Kudos to all the guys who jumped in on this early. More coins will certainly come. Hopefully with a more straight forward method to getting everything setup.
This type of mining is ripe for abuse until storage providers adjust their pricing models. Kudos to all the guys who jumped in on this early. More coins will certainly come. Hopefully with a more straight forward method to getting everything setup. Yup, long-term vs short-term mining. However, S3 will cost around $30/month/TB, whereas you can buy 5TB hard drives for $200, or around $40/TB, with a 2-3 year warranty. Also, consider that you'll need a beefy EC2 instance to originally generate the plots, so add in a c3.8xlarge, cc2.8xlarge, or r3.8xlarge instance, which can generate somewhere around 14000 nonces/min for $0.28/hr, or around 205GB/hr. So each TB of S3 storage will require around $1.70 for generation, plus $30/month to hold. After three months, a 5TB setup would cost you a bit over $460 to run. Reduced redundancy storage is marginally cheaper, and volume discounts save you a bit over 3% once you cross the 450TB barrier, so S3 doesn't get considerably cheaper.
Here's a cheaper solution for people wanting to do hard drive mining in the cloud:
Find a dedicated server provider who offers high-storage dedicated servers AND high-CPU dedicated servers in the same Datacenter. Look for ones with unlimited or unmetered connections for inside-database transfers. Make sure the port speed on each machine is at least 500Mbps, 1Gbps up for high-CPU and down for storage is preferred.
Rent a high-CPU server for a month, and generate plots.
Move plots from high-CPU box to storage box, using ftp or wget.
Have storage server periodically (once every few hours) restart the mining process to account for newly-transferred plot files.
Of course the above could be easily automated with some creative scripting or some form of network signaling, but even manually the above process requires very little attention, and once your storage server is filled, you can cancel the high-CPU dedicated server, or use it to fill the plots of another storage server. Some datacenters will allow you to rent servers weekly, so you can get a high-CPU server for one week. Be careful with using by-the-hour cloud machines for generation, as not only are they in different datacenters which may cause bandwidth issues, but bandwidth on per-hour servers is almost always very expensive. 1TB of traffic out from EC2 to the internet would cost you around $122.88.
The service you are offering is a good deal and more convenient. So, some would be better getting a service from someone like you or run their own storage server. Power cost are really low, even with a 20x 4TB HDD array compared to gpu/asic mining.
