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14 Comments

Cloudflare launches Object Storage with no egress fees

  1. 3

    I am really excited to see how true the no egress fees is. Could be a game changer for my podcast hosting company, where bandwidth is one of the largest costs.

  2. 1

    Cloudflare is always on the leading edge

  3. 1

    It's not public yet tho...

  4. 1

    Wow. This would save a lot of people a lot of money.

  5. 1

    While searching for S3-compatible storage services, I found the most unexpensive ones to be Backblaze B2 and Wasabi. The latter was the only one without egress fees and just slightly more expensive than Backblaze B2 in storage cost.
    It also still remains much cheaper than what Cloudflare's offer, so I don't really see any disruptions here

    1. 3

      A few things that could make this better.

      A. Wasabi's fine print for egress states that there is no fee for egress up to the amount you have stored. So 1 TB stored is 1 TB of egress. For files accessed a lot you will go over that.

      B. Wasabi stores your bucket at a single location. So if you aren't running a CDN in front of it you will have slow access to places not near where the bucket is physically located. You are probably going to run another CDN in front of it where you have to pay for bandwidth.

      C. For every object on Wasabi you have to pay to store it for 3 months no matter what. If you upload a file and then delete it an hour later, it doesn't matter. You are going to be paying for that file to be stored for 3 months.

      With Cloudflare it looks like the no egress will be from their already massive CDN. So you will get faster access speeds all over the world. No need for a separate CDN in front of your storage bucket. Cloudflare also has a history of giving away a lot of bandwidth for free. It will depend on their limitations, but I have a feeling they will not have the free limit be as low as Wasabi's limit is.

      So their prices are 3x or so Wasabi/Backblaze, but if you get a massive global CDN with high reliability and no egress fees it seems like it could be a better option than Wasabi/Backblaze. If you just need object storage for say backups, or infrequently accessed data then Wasabi/Backblaze win out. For my use case with podcast files that are accessed constantly it could be a nice upgrade.

      1. 1

        Wow, your research was definitively better than mine 😅

        I did not know that, on Wasabi, the free egress goes only up to the amount stored nor that you have to pay for 3 months minimum for every object stored (!!!).

        Now it makes sense. It differs majorly from what, for instance, AWS S3 offers.

        I can only imagine that for your use case of a podcast the major access pattern for the object storage (of the audios themselves) is content distribution, where egress (costs, performance etc) is more important than any other operation on the storage provider.

        Bottomline is, now I got your point and that is indeed a major feature coming from Cloudflare 😬

  6. 1

    no egress fees...incredible. Already subscribed to the beta, hope will be available soon

  7. 1

    Not clear if it includes usable group access control

  8. 1

    That does look pretty awesome, I've always shied away from offering users any file storage because of the egress fees (if they shared videos or something between 100s of people it would be costly)

  9. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

      1. 1

        Anytime you want to get something out of your object storage you pay an egress fee. Anytime someone downloads something that you have stored in your object storage you pay an egress fee.

        So for the podcast example. You upload your podcast, it is stored in object storage. Anytime someone wants to download the podcast you pay an egress fee to take a copy out of storage and deliver it to a listener. You can imagine with popular files that are downloaded a lot these fees can really add up.

        1. 1

          thanks for the explanation

        2. 1

          This comment was deleted a year ago.

          1. 1

            This is Cloudflare's S3 competitor. They are cheeky and did the letter before S and the number before 3, thus R2.

            It will use the same API functionality that you use for S3. You just change the bucket URL and you should be able to work the same way you do currently with S3.

            S3 charges a lot for bandwidth, and you usually run with AWS Cloudfront in front of it as a CDN, which also charges a lot for bandwidth.

            So you are looking at significant savings in bandwidth going from expensive (AWS) to free ( Cloudflare). You also will get savings in just straight storage costs, since Cloudflare's R2 is cheaper there as well.

            So yes I would definitely use this over S3.

            1. 1

              This comment was deleted a year ago.

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