Practical guide · verified against the real thing
Object storage explained: the cheap way to hold files (and the egress catch)
In one line: Object storage is where the internet keeps its files — S3, R2 and the rest. Here is what it is, what it is for, and the one cost difference that decides which you pick.
Object storage is the workhorse behind most of the files on the internet: the images, backups, videos and datasets that do not belong on a web server's disk. Instead of a folder tree on one machine, files are stored as flat "objects" in a "bucket," each with a unique key, served over HTTP and effectively unlimited in size. Amazon S3 defined the category; Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi and others now compete on it.
What it is good for
Anything you write once and read many times, at scale: media for a website or app, user uploads, backups (the off-site copy in the 3-2-1 backup rule), logs and datasets. It is durable — providers replicate objects across machines — and it costs a fraction of keeping that data on a server's disk. It is not a filesystem: there is no real folder hierarchy and no in-place editing, so it suits storage and delivery, not a working directory.
The cost difference that actually decides it
Storing data is cheap and similar across providers; the real differentiator is egress — what you pay to pull data back out. The incumbents charge meaningfully for egress, which is the same trap described in why cloud bills spike; several newer providers built their whole pitch on cheap or zero egress. So the honest way to choose is to estimate how often the data will be read, not just how much you will store: a write-once archive and a hot, frequently-served media bucket have opposite economics.
The practical pairing
Object storage almost always pairs with a CDN — put the bucket behind a CDN and visitors pull from a nearby cache instead of billing origin egress every time, the mechanism in what a CDN does. For the static half of a site this combination is cheap and fast; the hosting decision around it is the one in hosting types compared. As ever, prices differ by region and change often, so check the provider's current page for your jurisdiction rather than trusting a remembered number.
Sources
Next