Object Storage

Why Self-Host Your Object Storage?

Amazon S3 charges $0.023/GB/month for storage and $0.09/GB for data transfer out — costs that seem small until you store terabytes of backups, media files, or application data. A 10TB S3 bucket costs $230/month in storage alone, plus egress fees every time you access your data. Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage have similar pricing models designed to make it cheap to put data in but expensive to take it out. These egress fees create vendor lock-in: once your data is in S3, moving it elsewhere costs real money, which discourages migration.

Self-hosted object storage provides S3-compatible APIs on your own hardware, eliminating both storage and egress fees. SeaweedFS is a distributed storage system that handles billions of files efficiently with automatic replication and erasure coding for data protection. Garage provides a lightweight, geo-distributed S3-compatible object store designed for self-hosting, with multi-site replication that works across unreliable network links — ideal for distributing storage across multiple locations. RustFS offers a high-performance S3-compatible server written in Rust. VersityGW provides an S3 gateway that fronts existing storage systems with an S3 API.

The S3 API has become the de facto standard for object storage, meaning any application that works with S3 — backup tools, media servers, application file uploads — works with self-hosted S3-compatible storage without code changes. You configure your application to point at your local S3 endpoint instead of AWS, and it works identically. The economics are straightforward: a 10TB disk costs roughly $200 one-time versus $230/month on S3, and the break-even point for self-hosted object storage versus cloud storage is typically 3-6 months. For organizations storing large amounts of infrequently accessed data — backups, media archives, log storage — self-hosted object storage provides the same API compatibility at a fraction of the ongoing cost.