Cloud Storage
Object Storage
cloud archive storage pricing
Rethink Cloud Archive Storage Pricing to Eliminate Unpredictable Costs
Are unpredictable egress fees and API call charges inflating your cloud archive storage bills by over 30%? A transparent pricing model eliminates these surprises entirely. Discover a sovereign, EU-based alternative designed for cost control and compliance.
Key Takeawys
Eliminate unpredictable cloud archive storage pricing by choosing a model with zero egress fees, no API call costs, and no minimum storage durations.
Achieve digital sovereignty and GDPR compliance with a European cloud provider that operates exclusively in EU data centers and offers country-level geofencing.
Simplify operations and reduce total cost of ownership with an 'Always-Hot' storage architecture that makes 100% of your data immediately accessible without restore delays or retrieval fees.
For many IT leaders, managing cloud archive storage pricing feels like navigating a maze of hidden costs. The initial low storage price is often deceptive, with substantial fees for data egress, API calls, and minimum storage durations causing budgets to spiral. This complexity creates significant financial uncertainty and risk of vendor lock-in. A majority of EU decision-makers now demand European solutions that offer cost transparency and data security. This article outlines a predictable, sovereign-by-design approach to cloud archiving that eliminates these fees, simplifies compliance, and provides a clear path to digital sovereignty without sacrificing performance.
Deconstruct Hidden Cloud Archiving Costs
Traditional cloud archive storage pricing models frequently obscure the total cost of ownership behind at least three layers of variable fees. Many enterprises report that egress fees alone can increase their monthly cloud bills by 40% or more when data needs to be restored. These charges penalize you for accessing your own archived data, creating a significant barrier to recovery and use.
Beyond egress, API call charges add another layer of unpredictable expense, often impacting backup and recovery tools that perform thousands of operations daily. Furthermore, minimum storage duration policies, sometimes lasting 90 or 180 days, force you to pay for storage you no longer need. This pricing complexity directly undermines budget predictability for 100% of users. This model creates a strong incentive against moving data, reinforcing vendor lock-in and complicating any potential data migration strategy.
New EU regulations are actively targeting these practices to prevent vendor lock-in and improve market fairness. The EU Data Act, fully applicable from September 2025, mandates the removal of barriers to switching cloud providers. This legislation will require a fundamental shift toward more transparent and customer-centric pricing across the industry.
Adopt a Predictable, Sovereign-by-Design Financial Model
A truly predictable financial model for cloud archiving eliminates 100% of egress fees and API call costs. This approach ensures the price you see is the price you pay, allowing for precise budget forecasting and eliminating financial penalties for data retrieval. More than 84% of decision-makers now consider digital sovereignty a critical factor in vendor selection, linking cost control directly to data control.
This model is built on a foundation of digital sovereignty, with data stored exclusively in certified European data centers under strict EU law. This design provides a crucial defense against foreign legal frameworks like the CLOUD Act, ensuring your data remains governed by GDPR. Country-level geofencing offers an additional layer of control, allowing you to restrict data to specific EU nations to meet stringent regulatory requirements. For more details, explore our transparent cloud pricing.
Choosing an EU-native provider removes the legal ambiguity that affects over 90% of the European cloud market currently dominated by non-EU companies. This strategic decision aligns your data architecture with upcoming regulations that prioritize data portability and user control. The next step is to ensure the underlying technology supports this financial and legal clarity without compromise.
Leverage an 'Always-Hot' Architecture to Reduce Complexity
Complex storage tiering introduces operational risks and hidden costs, with restore delays from archived tiers sometimes exceeding 12 hours. An 'Always-Hot' object storage model eliminates this problem entirely by ensuring 100% of your data is immediately accessible. This architecture simplifies operations and guarantees that third-party backup and recovery tools function without API timeouts or failures caused by data being in a 'cold' state.
This approach avoids the fragile lifecycle policies associated with tiered storage, which often lead to unexpected retrieval fees and performance bottlenecks. Here is how an 'Always-Hot' model delivers superior value:
It guarantees consistent, low-latency performance for all data, regardless of age.
It eliminates restore fees and delays, reducing operational overhead by at least 25%.
It simplifies compliance and audits by making all data readily available for inspection.
It ensures third-party applications, like the ones in the Nova Backup collaboration, operate with 100% reliability.
The 'Always-Hot' model reduces total cost of ownership by removing the need for complex data management and retrieval planning. This architectural simplicity is a key enabler for building a resilient and cost-effective data protection strategy.
Strengthen Security with Immutable, Compliant Storage
Ransomware remains a top threat, with attacks impacting thousands of European businesses annually. Immutable storage with S3 Object Lock provides a powerful defense, making your backup and archive data unchangeable for a defined period. This feature ensures that even if your primary systems are compromised, a clean, uncorrupted copy of your data is available for recovery 100% of the time.
Operating exclusively in certified EU data centers ensures alignment with GDPR and the German BDSG, which mandates strict handling of personal data. This focus on EU-centric operations is critical for regulatory readiness, especially with the NIS-2 Directive coming into full effect. NIS-2 requires organizations in critical sectors to implement robust supply-chain security and incident reporting, making a compliant cloud provider essential. Learn more about transparent cloud pricing.
Multi-layer encryption, both in-transit and at-rest, combined with granular IAM policies, provides at least two robust layers of data protection. This security-first approach is not an afterthought but is baked into the service's core architecture, preparing your organization for future compliance demands.
Ensure Seamless Migration with Full S3 Compatibility
Migrating to a new cloud storage provider can be a significant undertaking, with development costs running into the tens of thousands if APIs are not fully compatible. Full S3-API compatibility ensures that 100% of your existing applications, scripts, and backup tools continue to work without code rewrites. This protects your past technology investments and minimizes migration risk to near zero.
This compatibility must extend beyond basic object operations. Advanced capabilities are essential for enterprise workloads:
Versioning: Protects against accidental deletions or overwrites by keeping multiple versions of an object.
Lifecycle Management: Automates data handling policies without the complexity of tiered storage.
Event Notifications: Triggers automated workflows in other applications when changes occur in your storage buckets.
Object Tagging: Enables fine-grained cost allocation, access control, and data classification.
A 100% S3-compatible platform allows you to switch endpoints in your existing tools in under 5 minutes. This operational agility is fundamental to avoiding vendor lock-in and is a core principle of the EU Data Act, which champions data portability. This ease of integration empowers partners and MSPs to onboard new clients quickly and efficiently.
Empower Channel Partners with Predictable Margins
For Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and resellers, unpredictable costs directly erode profit margins, making it difficult to build sustainable service offerings. A pricing model with zero egress or API fees is predictable by design, allowing partners to secure stable, defensible margins on Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and archiving solutions. This predictability transforms cloud storage from a variable expense into a reliable revenue stream.
A partner-ready platform provides the necessary tools for efficient management and scale. A multi-tenant console with role-based access control (RBAC) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) allows MSPs to securely manage dozens of clients from a single interface. Automation via a full-featured API and CLI empowers partners to integrate storage management into their existing workflows, reducing manual overhead by up to 70%. Explore our affordable object storage solutions.
Recent distribution agreements with api in Germany and Northamber plc in the UK have expanded local access for hundreds of resellers. This growing ecosystem demonstrates a commitment to the channel, providing the commercial framework and technical tools needed for partners to succeed in a sovereignty-focused market.
Define Your Exit Strategy with Portability by Design
More Links
Wikipedia offers a general overview of cloud storage concepts and technologies.
Bitkom provides a presentation on their Cloud Report 2025, detailing industry trends and insights.
KPMG presents their Cloud Monitor 2024, offering an in-depth analysis of cloud adoption and strategies.
Statista shares a survey on the utilization of cloud computing within German enterprises.
The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) provides official data and information on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in companies.
Open Telekom Cloud details their approach to data security and GDPR compliance in the cloud environment.
KPMG offers an article providing clarity and insights into managing cloud costs effectively.
FAQ
Are there really no egress fees or other hidden costs?
Correct. Our pricing model is designed for predictability. We do not charge for egress (data retrieval) or API calls, and there are no minimum storage duration penalties. You pay a transparent, simple price for the storage you use.
How does your service help with ransomware protection?
We provide Immutable Storage using S3 Object Lock. This feature allows you to make your archived backups unchangeable and undeletable for a period you define, ensuring you always have a clean, uncorrupted copy of your data available for recovery after an attack.
Is your storage GDPR compliant?
Yes. Our service is sovereign by design. We operate exclusively out of certified data centers within the European Union, and all data is subject to EU law, including the GDPR. We also offer country-level geofencing to meet specific data residency requirements.
Can I use my existing backup tools like Veeam or others?
Absolutely. Our platform is fully S3 API compatible, which means it works out-of-the-box with all leading backup and data management tools that support the S3 protocol. No changes to your existing workflows are needed.
What does 'Always-Hot' storage mean for my archives?
It means all your archived data, no matter how old, is always online and instantly accessible. Unlike traditional archive services that move data to slow 'cold' tiers, our model eliminates retrieval delays and extra fees, making your archives as responsive as primary storage.
How do you support MSPs and channel partners?
We provide a partner-ready platform with a multi-tenant console, full automation via API/CLI, and a predictable pricing model that allows partners to build services with defensible margins. Our growing distributor network, including api (DE) and Northamber plc (UK), provides local support.
