How cheap can cloud object storage be?

Simon Hargreaves
3 min readAug 8, 2019
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.

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Simon Hargreaves

I've a writer, film maker, team leader and technologist. Working on the forefront of creative technology for over 20 years.