4 Hidden Costs Of Object Storage Services

Cloage Cloud Services
3 min readMay 17, 2021

Most cloud object providers offer a reliable and safe platform for businesses to develop and operate applications without having to maintain a data center, invest in hardware, or install and upgrade software. Although most object storage providers provide the same services, how they charge for and deliver those services differs.

Theses costs come from a handful of object storage services we examined, including Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3), Azure blob storage, Google Cloud Services (GCS) and Wasabi Cloud.

Here’s a breakdown of 4 hidden costs of object storage services and why they are important:

1- Minimum data retention policy

Basically this fee applies when you upload some of your objects on your cloud, delete it and still get charged for it. various object storage services have this policy so look out for it.

For Example, Wasabi claims to be 80% cheaper than Amazon S3, This is completely true if you take in this context:

“It’s only cheaper if you store your data there for more than 90 Days”

Wasabi has a 90-day retention policy in place and this would mean if your data is customized or deleted often, you’ll probably be paying more for your storage than Amazon S3.

Image from Wasabi

2- Egress fee

Egress fees have always been a huge part of cloud bills, Most of the object storage services include this in their billing, so look out for your egress costs before it’s too late.

Reading up on egress fees of your cloud storage provider is a good way to not be surprised by the billing when the time comes, like this Reddit user.

It’s an extremely important aspect of your cloud billing and specially if you’re on a tight budget, It’s better to calculate all your costs before it gets too late.

Some Object storage services do NOT offer any egress fees like Cloage or Wasabi, So you can give them a try too.

3- Request Costs

if you don’t have a clear vision of how many requests you will be using on a monthly basis, this would be a huge part of your billing in the long run, so keep your request limit or else, you’ll have some trouble with your accounting team.

Again, this is something that can get out of hand pretty quick, especially if you’re a team and various users will need to do actions your storage.

4- Bandwidth Usage

If you’re not planning to access your storage or not show them to public, don’t worry about this. But if you plan to have your data accessed via your website or app, keep an eye out for this hidden cost too, most vendors will charge obscene amounts if your bandwidth usage surpasses the amount of storage you have.

Final Words

If you are planning on cutting your cloud bills, there are various amounts you can look into before it gets too late.

Try Cloage and start using it for a cloud storage that truly has no hidden costs :)

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