How cheap can cloud object storage be?

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

There are a lot of providers offering cloud storage for businesses, they all use a REST API for access data objects. Some of them provide cheaper tiered storage for longer-term slower access storage or more redundant multi-region storage, but for a fair comparison, we will only consider their standard single region hot storage.

Cloud providers

• Amazon S3 — The defacto standard for cloud-based object storage. The S3 protocol being a common interface that multiple storage providers support. Using regional hot storage for comparison.
• Microsoft Azure — Microsoft’s cloud service, relatively new to the cloud market but has a significant number of regions and datacenters. Using Hot Data Lake Storage Gen2. Azure specific protocol does not support S3.
• Backblaze — Backblaze is highly focused on storage. The Backblaze storage service has been going for years, but their new-ish B2 service is trying to compete in the business object storage market. B2 specific protocol, not S3 compatible.
• Brightbox — A UK based cloud provider with two UK based datacenters. Orbit is based on the OpenStack Swift storage is S3 compatible.
• CloudWatt — A French cloud provider with two French data centres running Openstack. OpenStack Swift, S3 compatible.