PAYG object storage — what are people actually using?

Been shopping around for S3-compatible storage that actually bills by the GB without egress gotchas. My use case is media archives from auction servers, mostly cold-ish.

Current setup:

• 4x 16TB HGST SAS drives in RAIDZ2
• ZFS with lz4
• Total usable ~43TB

Problem is offsite. Colo bandwidth is fine for ingress but if I ever need to pull back a few TB the overages sting. Want something I can rsync to and forget, pull back once a year maybe.

Looked at a few providers but the pricing pages are all "contact sales" or they hide the API request fees six clicks deep. For that money you get better transparency from a used drive reseller.

What are people actually paying per GB all-in? Including the gotchas.

Oh this is close to my heart

Before anyone jumps on price per GB, did you test your restore? I ask because I've seen too many "cheap" setups where the restore either fails or costs 3x the storage in egress.

Quick checklist for your use case:

• 3 copies total (your ZFS pool counts as 1)
• 2 different media types (spinning disk + cloud object)
• 1 offsite (the PAYG target)

For cold archives, versioning is the silent killer budget-wise. Did you check if the provider keeps every overwrite forever? That 43TB can become 80TB real fast if you're syncing deltas daily.

Also — and I know this isn't what you asked — but have you considered if ZFS send/receive is cleaner than rsync for this? Snapshot-based, incremental, checksums built in.

What does your 3-2-1 look like right now?

Why pay for object storage when you can self-host it

Seriously. MinIO in a docker compose stack, reverse proxy through traefik with LE certs, done. I run this on a 4 core KVM at OVHcloud with 2TB disk and it handles ~8TB of actual data across friends/family. Cost is flat monthly, no API fees, no egress math.

Compose is basically:

• Minio
• Mc (for bucket policies)
• Watchtower for updates
• fail2ban on the host

Backblaze B2 or whatever as the replication target if you're paranoid. But the primary? Own it.

The only time cloud object storage wins is if you need 11 nines and a compliance officer. For homelab and small shop stuff, the self-hosted route stops the meter from running.

Your colo already has the pipe. Use it.

Ngl I looked at this for model checkpoints and the math is brutal lol

LLM training artifacts are chunky — 70B param saves are 140GB+ each, I keep like 20 versions during a run. Was gonna use object storage as the "cheap tier" but API costs murdered me.

Contabo's PAYG looked good on paper, something like €0.006/GB, but then:

• PUT is $0.005 per 1000
• LIST is $0.005 per 1000
• GET is $0.004 per 1000

Doesn't sound like much until you're doing 50k requests shuffling checkpoints around. My bill was 40% storage, 60% API fees

For inference weights I just eat the disk cost now. Spinning rust on a local box, rsync nightly. Slower to load but zero surprise billing.

If you're truly cold archive, tape is still king. LTO-9 is like $8/TB native and no one charges you to list your own files lol

52 boxes and I still can't quit buying storage

Ran the numbers on 6 providers last month for a 10TB cold test. Here's what actually hit my card:

• Vultr: $0.008/GB storage, $0.01/GB egress, no API fees
• Hetzner: €0.005/GB storage, €0.008/GB egress, API fees apply
• InterServer: $0.009/GB storage, first 100GB egress free then $0.012
• RackNerd: $0.007/GB storage, $0.009/GB egress, $0.003/GB ingress lol
• GreenCloudVPS: $0.006/GB storage, $0.015/GB egress, min $5/mo
• Hostinger: flat $12/TB, unlimited egress, no API fees

For pure $/GB with predictable pulls, Hostinger won. For "I might never download this," Vultr. RackNerd's ingress fee is a crime against nature.

I spread 10TB across 3 of them as a test. So far Hostinger is the only one where the bill matched the calculator. The others had "line items" that appeared week 2.

Your 43TB at Hostinger rates = ~$43/mo. For that money you get https://www.hostinger.com — not bad.

1. Egress is not the only trap. Audit the pricing for:

• Multipart upload aborts (some providers bill for incomplete parts)
• Early deletion fees (minimum 30-90 day retention)
• Class transition costs (moving from standard to glacier-like tiers)

2. For the stated use case — annual restore, 43TB ZFS source — the correct metric is $/GB/month with 12-month TCO including one full restore. Hostinger's flat rate simplifies this: $15/mo × 12 + $0 restore = $180/year. Vultr with one full egress: $4,128 storage + $430 egress = $4,558/year. Hetzner with API load: approximately €4,200 storage + €344 egress + $180 API = $4,724/year.

3. Self-hosted MinIO on colo bandwidth assumes your pipe is unmetered and your time has no cost. Both are often false in practice. OVHcloud 2TB plans are not 43TB plans.

4. Versioning: if using rsync without --delete or with snapshot-style sync, ex

Seriously though, half these "PAYG" shops want a card on file and then bill you retroactive. No thanks. Hostinger takes BTC and XMR, Vultr is BTC-only last I checked, Hetzner doesn't do crypto at all.

Privacy angle: if you're archiving media you don't want tied to your name, the KYC on these storage accounts is wild. Upload from VPN, pay with XMR, use a mailbox address. Basic opsec.

Also if you're staking any PoS coins, some of the newer ones let you pin IPFS hashes as a side effect. Not S3 compatible but free "storage" if you were going to run the validator anyway. I know a guy who shoved 200GB of linux isos into Celestia blobs. Cursed but worked.

Anyone tried paying InterServer with monero? Their checkout flow says "contact support" which usually means no.

What's the actual egress cost on that colo, I never see it listed

$0.05/GB over 10TB/month, which is why I want out for restores. My contract is old enough to drink.

Small correction: Hostinger's cheapest shared plan is $12/mo on renewal, so a year would be ~$144. You might be thinking of their cheapest VPS tier. Still beats Vultr on egress if you pull back once — https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

I've got a client doing exactly this with 8TB of drone footage. Hostinger's Phoenix DC pings decent from Denver, steveipw.