Amazon S3
The industry-standard managed object storage service, effectively infinite scale with zero ops.
Proprietary object-storagecloud
Pricing
Usage-based, from around $0.023/GB/month.
S3 is the default nearly everyone starts with, and for good reason — durability guarantees, deep AWS ecosystem integration, and tooling maturity that self-hosted alternatives are still catching up to.
Key features
- Effectively unlimited scale, no capacity planning
- 11 nines of durability, backed by AWS SLAs
- Deep integration with the rest of AWS (Lambda, CloudFront, etc.)
- Mature SDK and tooling ecosystem across every language
Self-hosted vs. cloud
Fully managed — zero infrastructure to run, but egress fees and per-GB storage costs are worth modeling carefully at scale.
Quick start
aws s3 cp ./file.txt s3://your-bucket/file.txt
Alternatives
MinIO is the self-hosted path if egress costs or data residency requirements make S3 impractical.