Guide To Cloud Object Storage

If your startup stores lots of files, you’re familiar with huge egress and storage fees. What should you do?

Here’s what I will cover in this post:

1. How to save money on a big-3 vendor (GCP, AWS or Azure)
2. Backblaze B2: Great for web content
3. Storj DCS: Affordable and flexible
4. Wasabi: Great for hot archive
5. Cloudflare R2 and their opportunity

Being an Indie Hacker myself, I’ve learned that the most important thing to getting users and maximizing for growth is to ship quickly.

Choosing an inexpensive cloud object storage provider that increases your time to launch can be a huge mistake. I’m here to help you not make that mistake, while setting up your product for efficient growth.

How To Save Money With The Big 3 Providers

If you’re already using GCP, AWS or Azure, you should try to optimize your storage bills before moving somewhere else entirely.

AWS S3? Try Intelligent Tiering

Intelligent tiering optimizes storage costs by moving your files between frequent access and infrequent access storage tiers.

Azure or GCP? Try lifecycle policies

If your old files are rarely accessed, both GCP and Azure allow you to change storage classes or delete objects based on a number of factors.

Understanding how your old files are accessed and shifting storage classes can cut down your storage bill.

Here’s the documentation on lifecycle management: GCP, Azure.

Use a CDN

While simple, this is often missed. CDNs like Cloudflare, CloudFront or Fastly can help you cut down on egress and request fees for your most frequently accessed files.

If You Need/Want To Choose Another Provider

A Warning

Alternative vendors, despite claiming to have “an S3 compatible API” do not have feature parity with the Big 3.

A few of the most common things to watch out for are:

• No “eventing.” If you need to trigger a function based on your object’s lifecycle, you’re out of luck
• Patchy S3 API. Backblaze B2 in particular lacks a lot of the advanced features of the S3 API. You’re not even able to create pre-signed URLs
• Pricing structures are less “simple” than they claim

However, if your use case is still a fit, you could save 80%+ by adopting the right provider for your use case.

Backblaze B2: Great for web content

Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare are part of the bandwidth alliance where transferring data from Backblaze to Cloudflare is free, and then of course Cloudflare offers free egress for many of its customers.

If you have high egress fees from serving web content (like HTML/images/stylesheets etc), they can be an excellent choice.

Storj DCS: An excellent all around choice

Storj DCS is priced very competitively at only $4/TB. Built on blockchain technology, Storj DCS encrypts, splits up your files, and stores them in 80 different segment each stored on different nodes. To retrieve your files, Storj DCS only needs 29 nodes to be online.

Great pricing and built-in encryption makes Storj DCS a compelling option. However, Storj DCS has a “per-segment fee.” This is an added $0.0000088 for each file under 64MB or any 64MB parts of files greater than 64MB.

Wasabi: Great for hot archive

Hot archive is good for when you store files that are rarely accessed, but require quick retrieval times. A good example of this kind of data access pattern is police body-cam footage.

At $6/TB with free egress, Wasabi has predictable pricing… assuming you operate under their constraints.

Wasabi bills each object for a minimum of 90 days. If you upload an object and then immediately replace it, you’ll be paying for both objects for the full 90 day period!

Wasabi’s free egress also comes with a major caveat. If you egress more than your active storage amount, Wasabi reserves the right to limit or suspend your service.

Cloudflare R2 and their opportunity

Cloudflare R2 plans to launch at $15/TB. That’s3x more expensive than Backblaze B2, and Backblaze B2 is already part of their bandwidth alliance. How does Cloudflare R2 plan to stand out?

1. Cloudflare R2 will be integrated with their Workers platform, something the specialized storage providers can’t match
2. R2 will replicate objects across multiple data centers, something Backblaze and Wasabi don’t do
3. Free egress really will mean free egress. With the bandwidth alliance partners, like Backblaze, files are limited to “web content.” You can read about Cloudflare’s “Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content” here.