The cloud providers which I discuss further offer all these storage classes. Examples: Azure Blob Archive, Amazon Glacier. But regarding how slow retrieving from this tier is, avoid keeping your recent backups here. It may take from several minutes to hours until your data retrieval starts. That’s perfect storage to keep data for “damn long time”. Examples: Azure Blob Cool tier, Amazon S3 Standard – Infrequent Access (IA). This type of storage is optimized for long-lived and less frequently accessed data, for example backups and older data where access frequency is lower, but high performance is still a priority. Keeping data in the warm tier is cheaper than in the hot one. Examples: Azure Blob Storage Hot tier, Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) Standard, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. It is perfect fit for running dynamic websites, content distribution, cloud applications (i.e., mobile and gaming), and big data analytics. So if you need a to regularly access you data in cloud, you go for hot storage. Thanks to its low latency and high throughput, hot tier is great cloud storage option for frequently accessed data where performance is crucial. They all serve specific purposes and may be named differently, but the overall idea remains the same: with temperature fall, the retrieval time increases and the price goes down.

Going from Hot to ColdĪs you, probably, already know, cloud providers typically offer three cloud storage tiers: hot, warm, and cold. So today, we’ll have a closer look at some public cloud providers to decide on the cheapest storage. However, despite there is a wide range of cloud offerings, we still struggle with choosing a cloud provider that offers us storage we need without charging us a steep price in the end of the billing period.

Therefore, cloud becomes a really great alternative to purchasing more physical storage or compute resources to maintain data and applications. Moreover, the competition in the cloud market is getting tougher, making cloud storage providers cut their prices just to stay afloat. The number of cloud storage providers grows, delivering various solutions that fit the needs of different organizations in terms of features and prices. What was a privilege of enterprises just a few years ago, now becomes a common thing for companies of all sizes – I’m talking about cloud.

Backblaze b2 pricing calculator