This is a test blog post to play with CTA components

This is the first in a series of blog posts based on excerpts from our new eBook, Demystifying Cloud Object Storage: The Ultimate Guide to the Hidden Fees That Can Break Your Budget. It is designed to help you understand the worst of these fees, when they’re triggered, and how they can rapidly add up to negatively impact your budget and your business decision-making.

The cloud storage industry has a fee problem

Cloud storage fees for egress are a big problem, one that’s made headlines in recent years for being an anti-competitive practice among the hyperscalers. However, an even greater problem are the countless fees for API requests and everyday operations that most leading cloud storage providers charge for data stored in their environments. These opaque pricing practices, coupled with complex tiering models, make it next to impossible for customers to understand, let alone predict, what their total storage costs will be. It’s a big reason why 62% of IT organizations went over their cloud storage budgets in 2024.

API-based data operations fees for reads, writes, and lists are some of the most recognizable. But these are just the tip of the iceberg, with lesser-known fees for such things as object lock, object lifecycle policies, and replication making a substantial impact on monthly billing.

On the face of it, these fees look harmless—typically only a fraction of a cent per GB or per 1,000 requests. However, when you multiply them by the millions or tens of millions of operations that can easily occur each month as your data store scales, your total costs can skyrocket.