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Cheap S3 storage
FlorinMarian
Member, Host Rep
in Help
Hello friends!
As part of the transformation of HAZI.ro from a single service provider that you can find at absolutely all providers on the LET, I need your help to understand what your needs and expectations are vis-à-vis S3 storage for beginning.
Short question: where can you find the cheapest S3 storage and at what price?
Thank you!
- From the start I mention that our S3 will have a price model based on a predefined quota that you will have to pay regardless of the degree of occupancy, but free in/out traffic within the limit of a few tens of TB/month.
Comments
Will be difficult to compete with currently established providers.. Backblaze, Storj, Wasabi, iDrive, OVH, Cloudflare etc etc.
When I need cheap s3 storage: Idrive e2
I also use OVH and Scaleway object storage
I use Backblaze B2. It costs $6/TB but pay as you go. You pay per GB used. So it's the cheapest and most reliable at this price point.
E2 by iDrive pricing seems hard to beat and in multiple locations
This is what I was told with classic hosting:
Idrive E2 has a different business model from what I see. Cheap space but very little free egress. (3x the purchased space from what I see).
OVH, on the other hand, charges the egress quite expensively, which again is different, because my clients will have fixed costs, without being able to accumulate debts.
Thanks both of you for your help!
It's a little different with object storage where you don't have differences such as space restrictions/memory etc.
What are you able to provide that Backblaze can't for example? Could you beat $6 per TB (billed by the hour) with a 99.9% uptime SLA.
I'm interested in what you would have, but would need to know why I'd choose yours over these.
idrive e2 $2.5/TB/month is the cheapest I've ever seen
Well, first of all, I rely on S3 for those who want to use it as a CDN for their sites, not primarily for backups.
Then, by a simple calculation:
** 1000GB
** 3000GB/mo free
** Price: $6
** 1000GB
** 30000GB/mo free
** 10 EUR/mo (fictitious price at the moment)
To serve 30TB/mo through Backbaze, you would have to pay an additional 27,000GB at a price of $0.01, i.e. another $270.
I hope I made myself understood as much as possible.
A very good question is, assuming I'll be driving 300t of traffic per month as a website cdn distribution, I'd probably go with cloudflare R2.
or go with bunny cdn's object storage.
Here, it's certainly nice if you have premium pricing to drive enough bandwidth/traffic, but does the S3 storage have a good enough quality network connection? I think that's another factor I need to consider.
Personally, I'd build my own Minio in addition for use.
For distribution to global customers, I would go with bunny if the traffic required is low, whereas if a lot of bandwidth is required, then R2 or B2 would definitely be valuable. b2 can go with cloudflare, and traffic egress fees can be waived.
So, sure, it's great to have new players coming in. But what would be your unique competitive edge as a heavy user of s3?
If you are using 10 EUR as a base, you could increase B2 to 2TB / 6TB BW in that case. Sure if that much bandwidth is required it would be suitable, but I'd rather > storage over that and I would assume that most would look at the higher storage.
This is just my 2c (coming from someone who currently sells storage space, not S3 though).
I have a niche use-case, so a bit different requirements when talking about S3. I've noticed that retrieving Signed URLs from Scaleway takes at least 100ms longer than from OVH. Additionally, the availability of features like file expiration, versioning, user access management, and encryption matters to me most. When used with CDN would be great to have cache expiration settings as well.
It's primary use is storage, not CDN.
If using a CDN with S3/B2/whatever, you'll find that most put a CDN in-front (which is why for example, traffic to Cloudfront from S3 is virtually free).
In your example above, is the 30TB of traffic distributed by a CDN?
If not, I would still need to put a CDN in front of of your storage service, so I haven't saved much.
Further, B2's infrastructure means that uploaded data is distributed over 20 different storage pods/vaults.
Lastly, if placed behind CloudFlare, thanks to the bandwith alliance, I can get virtually unlimited free egress from B2. With similar arrangements with other providers.
For $6/TB, this is an extremely difficult offer to beat.
Cheapest solution is a Hetzner server with 10x HDDs and Min.io. No random bandwidth costs and other crap.
LE: With the current Hetzner hourly pricing, if you do not need the server to be up 100% of the time you can just shut it down and use the robot API to WoL when needed.
We need .10$/TB with free egress
Do you mean Hetzner Cloud or dedicated servers? In my memory the dedicated servers cost money even if you turn them off. Is there a way to retain data in hetzner cloud after you stop the VM?
IDrive e2 is super cheap and works well for me at just $4/TB/month
iDrive is ridiculously cheap, works well and comes from a company with a long history with storage-based products and services and a huge customer base. It's gonna be hard to compete with them IMO.
This thread made me buy idrive e2
Hetzner introduced last month new hourly based pricing for almost everything, including dedicated servers. I have a bunch with them, and they sent me hourly based invoice this month for servers and IPs and I can confirm it is like this because I have a backup server that wakes up for the backups and then turns off after completion.
Normally cloud providers charge for the instance even if it's shut off.
Are you using Hetzner's API to create a new compute instance, perform the backup to object or other storage backend, and save the instance as an image or destroy it?
Or does Hetzner Cloud have some cool way to shut off an instance and not charge you? 🤔
Pavin.
Cloudflare is $15/TB with unlimited egress for free. For a $5 difference, I'd rather go with Cloudflare which is more battle-tested and also includes a cdn for free.
A big concern is replication. Standard S3 is triple replicated and same host doesn't count (no RAID), my understanding is AzA and AzB and AzC or another regional DC (if the no third AZs). How much redundancy will you be building in?
Hey!
Most probably we'll have different tiers.
Florin, did you thought about geo-redundant storage?
Not crazy RAID-10 array in one place, but RAID-5/NoRAID in two locations.
I think theres no cheap offer that has.
Customer would send data to one server and then it would be transfered onto second server.
If it would be two different continents (for example USA&Europe) it would be very interesting solution for many users, even for someone who has Plex server but their relatives in different continent have problems with buffering.
Many people here suggest iDrive E2, its very cheap and you could also get these users by offering single server "not that redundant" backup in addition to dual server solution.
iDrive E2 + hazi single location + local HDDs would be a great solution for cheap and redundant file storage.
Hazi dual location for everything that is not that important, but needs to be loaded fast across regions.
Instead of fighting directly with iDrive, Cloudflare R2 etc. think how you can attract these paid users to use your offer too. They wont trust you to have most reliable thing, but they would love to have cheap backup "just in case".
Hey!
My idea was to have redundancy at the European level through our own location in Romania and possibly OVH Germany, but your proposal is also very interesting:)
What I want everyone to understand is the fact that I will not fight for the lowest price but for uniqueness / low competition as offered by a free bandwidth x30 times higher than the storage capacity on the egress, completely free.
The fact that HAZI.ro now has more clients than when we had in the data center encourages me to believe that what I am doing, I am doing well.
bunny.net offers something similar. $10/TB/location for their HDD lineup, but has an option to replicate on the region you select. They only support FTP though, so adding S3 API could be helpful.
I think this won't help unless you host 2 seperate Plex servers on different regions?
I use iDrive E2 + Backblaze/Wasabi for my backups, and let an idling VPS copy over the files, so maybe having a managed synced storage may help in my case though.
My understanding is that basically you're selling to mostly video/large file storage websites. This is probably a good idea, but I think the problem comes due to the lack of caching CDN / global delivery. I'm sure there's a market for this, but my hunch is that it'll be hard to sell this to a lot of your potential customer base.
Yes, it ends up at $20/TB for 2 locations with no free egress.
Backblaze B2 + iDrive E2 ends up $10/TB so you save 50% of your money, get provider redundancy and on top of that both of these provider give you 3x free egress which is not the case with Bunny.
There's no reason to go with Bunny, its more expensive and worse in terms of reliability (because you are dependent on one provider).
Tons of people would like ~$2/TB object storage to compliment iDrive E2, so they would get nice redundancy at just ~6/TB.
For next project I'm gonna use Backblaze B2 as main and iDrive E2 + local HDD as backups. Yet another backup place for ~$2/TB "just in case" would be great.
Simple nginx rewrite that points different logged users/IPs/CNAMEs into different hostname/IP when visitor requests media file will do it. No need for two app servers, read directly from correct buckets.
Example