Cloudflare R2 Storage service takes direct aim at Amazon S3, hits on price and portability

Cloudflare on Tuesday announced its R2 Storage service with the promise that it will store customers' data without taking it hostage. R2 Storage stands for "Really Requestable," "Ridiculously Reliable," and several other aspirational formulations approved by marketing copywriters. It's designed to be compatible with S3, Amazon …

[MatthewSt]

> What Cloudflare is saying out of the box is not only can we do this cheaper, but we'll do it on your behalf automatically

I'm not quite sure this is what Cloudflare is saying. I think they'll be cheaper than the most expensive tier, but I don't think you're going to have the option of (for example) archive storage at a reduced rate. The way I read it is that Cloudflare will have one pricing tier, and they will balance performance internally and invisibly for you.

I'd love to be proved wrong though!

[Nick Stallman]

Does it actually matter? When the pricing is cheaper than most of S3 tiers?

Maybe not the best for long term archival but it's looking pretty good for virtually everything else.

Also the buckets I look after cost four figures a month, and the largest costs are not storage. Amazon hits you with a ton of other fees which Cloudflare are eliminating.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not the cheapest

Having had to look at this for work related reasons, AWS is one of the most expensive options out there. Others are much cheaper, and many are cheaper than what Cloudflare are talking about. However as always there are details in terms of availability, regions, where you data needs to be to get processed that also need to be factored in.

[Charlie Clark]

Hotel California

Most cloud providers have gone the egregious egress charging way. But this is not just about maximising profit but more about locking customers in. Once you've moved a couple of TB to AWS or Azure you will have multiple reasons including charges for not wanting to remove it.