Amazon S3 defined object storage, but it’s no longer the only sensible choice — and for many teams it’s not the best one. The market has split into distinct categories of object storage vendors, each with a different trade-off between features, price and control. Knowing which category you’re actually shopping in makes the decision far easier.
The four categories of object storage vendors
1. Hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
The biggest feature sets, the most regions, and the deepest integration with their own compute. The cost: complex pricing, meaningful egress fees, and data governed by the vendor’s home jurisdiction. Great if you’re already all-in on that cloud; expensive and heavy if you just need a bucket.
2. Independent storage specialists (Wasabi, Backblaze, Cloudflare R2)
These vendors compete on price and simplicity — flat storage rates, little or no egress, and a smaller but sufficient feature set. Ideal for backups and archives. The trade-offs are fewer regions, fewer advanced features, and (in some cases) your data leaving your region.
3. Regional and managed providers
Providers that run S3-compatible storage in a specific jurisdiction — for example, inside the EU — often with human support and no egress fees. This category matters most when data residency and predictable billing outrank having every last S3 feature. You get the standard S3 API and tooling, plus a real person to email.
4. Self-hosted (MinIO, Ceph, Garage)
Open-source software you run yourself on your own (or rented) hardware. Maximum control and no per-GB vendor bill, but you own the operations: capacity planning, upgrades, redundancy and on-call. Right for teams with the ops maturity to run storage; wrong for teams who want it to just work.
What to actually evaluate
Once you know your category, compare vendors on the things that bite later:
- API depth. Test multipart uploads, presigned URLs, lifecycle policies and versioning with your real tools — not a single test upload.
- Egress. Model your read pattern. A cheap storage rate with expensive reads can cost more than a slightly higher flat rate with free egress.
- Data residency. Confirm where the bytes physically live and which laws govern access. For EU data this is often non-negotiable.
- Durability & redundancy. How many copies, across how many failure domains, and is that included?
- Exit cost. Can you pull everything out without an egress penalty? Because everyone speaks S3, switching should be cheap — verify it.
Red flags
- Pricing that hides egress or per-request fees below the fold.
- “S3-compatible” with a long list of unsupported operations.
- No clear statement of where data is stored.
- No human support channel — only a forum.
Where a European vendor fits
If you’re an EU business, category 3 is often the sweet spot: the S3 API you already know, data kept in the EU under GDPR, predictable pricing, and support you can reach. Internetport’s object storage sits here — S3-compatible, hosted in our own European data center, no egress fees, with a free 10 GB tier so you can benchmark it against any vendor on this list before deciding. Pair this guide with our breakdown of how to compare object storage providers to shortlist quickly.