This is where cloud storage services come into the picture. Cloud storage services allow you to store your data in the cloud, through which you can easily retrieve and access information from anywhere across the globe. One immensely popular cloud storage service is Amazon S3, offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon S3 offers some excellent features and is a great choice for a cloud storage provider.

However, S3 itself is not perfect, falling short of some important features and sometimes providing overkill where it is not necessary. This article looks at the best cloud storage alternatives to Amazon S3 that are currently available on the market.

Digital Ocean Spaces

Digital Ocean Spaces is a leading cloud provider that has become immensely popular among developers. This cloud provider allows you to not only store but also serve and access large amounts of data, alongside immaculate performance. Digital Ocean Spaces has an excellent UI that is easy-to-use and user-friendly, allowing you to drag and drop items to your cloud storage with ease. Digital Ocean Spaces is also extremely cost-effective and has a decent pricing plan, which, in the long run, is much cheaper than what S3 offers. This cloud service also provides a built-in CDN feature that helps to reduce latency. Digital Ocean Spaces is even backed by one of the best documentations available, which has been highly praised by users. This service also allows easy integration with other Digital Ocean services, as well as AWS S3 API.

Wasabi

Wasabi is another excellent cloud storage provider that has gradually grown in popularity among the community. This cloud service offers a neat and tidy interface that is quite like what you would get with S3. Thus, Wasabi is often placed as a direct challenger and competitor to Amazon S3. Wasabi also offers services with much lower costs than S3, along with the same storage capacity as well as faster file transfers and no additional costs of egress and API requests.

Another strength of Wasabi is the availability of security and durability features. Wasabi offers security features, such as two-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption, to keep your data safe from corruption and degradation.

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is an enterprise-level cloud storage provider and comes closest to Amazon S3 in terms of the features that it offers. The Azure cloud service is a Microsoft-based product, which guarantees reliable and high-quality performance to its users. Azure offers a very secure system wherein your access management and storage keys are safely stored and not publicly exposed.

Moreover, the redundancy options that Azure provides allow you to keep your data safe in case of loss due to natural disasters, accidents, or other factors. Azure offers multiple pricing plans, each of which is dependent on several factors, including storage tier, region and availability of storage, amount of data to store, and so on.

Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage is another enterprise-level cloud provider that exists in the same league as Amazon and Azure. This cloud service has one of the largest networks in the world, as well as high-quality performance, allowing users to use their storage with less downtime and latency. Google Cloud Storage also has an excellent pricing plan, which, as with Azure, depends on several factors, including storage, network, and more. However, Google Cloud Storage is much more economical when large amounts of data need to be stored. This cloud service is also highly secure and offers integration with many GCP products.

IBM Cloud Storage

IBM Cloud Storage is another enterprise cloud storage provider that deserves a place on this list. This cloud storage service is extremely scalable, flexible, and simple, with high-quality performance that allows users to store large amounts of data with ease. IBM Cloud Storage sports an easy-to-use interface that is highly interactive and allows easy migration of data to and from system storage.

IBM Cloud Storage comes with a very rich documentation, along with an excellent support system that is always there to guide users. This service has a payment plan like AWS, offering a pay-as-you-go system that is dependent on multiple factors for cost.

Vultr

Vultr is a new player in the field, having only come into the picture in 2019. However, Vultr has grown significantly in recent years, and now boasts several datacenters across the globe. Vultr offers high-quality performance, along with an extremely reliable and efficient system. This cloud system offers features such as automatic backups, scheduled backups, and several extensive tools that allow you to manage your storage in a more well-organized manner.

Moreover, Vultr comes with one of the best billing systems, which charges users only when the server is turned on, along with a few other nominal charges. Vultr even has a professional support system that is always ready to help and guide users.

Linode

Linode is a cloud storage provider that exists in the same bracket as Vultr and Digital Ocean. Like Vultr, Linode is relatively new in town, but the cloud service has expanded vastly in recent years, gaining a huge presence across the globe. Linode boasts excellent performance and offers a robust set of tools to help you in deploying your server swiftly to the cloud.

Linode is extremely flexible, easy-to-use, and it offers multiple pricing plans to users from which users may choose whichever plan is best tailored to their unique needs. Linode also has an excellent assistance guide that offers in-depth explanations of the services provided.

Best Cloud Storage Alternative to Amazon S3

There are several great cloud storage options available for users these days, each of which offers its own unique and useful features. All seven cloud providers mentioned above are among the most popular and widely used alternatives, each providing users with exceptional features and efficient service. All in all, any choice from the above list would be worth considering.

Vertical Scaling of your Operation

By vertical scaling, I mean the optimal resource requirement per server. For example, if you need something small like 1 to 8 vCPUs and a 1 to 32 GB of memory, then you can consider any mainstream cloud hosting provider like DigitalOcean, Azure or AWS. This is by far the most common option, and probably something that you want. These services can scale to host anything from your hobby projects and personal blogs to the  complete stack of a typical DevOps pipeline.

For larger requirements, like upwards of 128GB of memory, it makes more economical sense to rent a dedicated server from vendors like OVH. The upfront cost might be higher in the later case, but over longer periods of time it is significantly cheaper.

You might want something completely managed by a cloud server provider including FaaS options like AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, or PaaS options like Google Cloud Platform. However, these don’t strictly count as a Linux environment, because you are restricted in the environment the vendor offers to you, rather than having your own Linux environment with root privileges, etc.

Horizontal Scalability

Horizontal scalability simply refers to the fact that how can you scale your software across multiple servers. In this context, it also refers to the outreach that your cloud service provider has to offer. Do they have data centers close to where your users might be? If you plan on hosting something like a VPN, then the question is different. Do they have data centers in regions which respect user privacy.

If you think that your user base will grow, then you need to plan ahead for this.

Automation

When it comes to servers, automation is the name of the game. These are not devices that are meant to be interacted by you, as an owner. They should quietly run the application they are supposed to run and get of your way.

With that in mind, a lot of services offer a whole array of services starting from cloud-init to an HTTP API with which you can remotely spin up servers and configure them. If your team is familiar with the API of one vendor and not the other, then it is better to stick to the familiar one rather than re-writing your entire tool-set for another vendor.

Once you have a set of scripts automating everything for you, it will save you hundreds of human hours in the long run. And you will never have to worry about a server being misconfigured because of human error. Visit the API documentation pages for all the vendors that you are considering, before making a decision.

Feature Set

To take full advantage of the open source software that comes with Linux you need to make sure that your server provider offers a certain minimum standard of features.

In case of cloud hosted VMs, these may include backups and snapshots, block devices, object store, floating IPs, managed firewall, private networking, DNS server and a wide range of Linux distros. In case of a dedicated server the features are more hardware specific like the availability of IPMI, remote KVM and a useful management interface like OVH’s  vRack.

Monitoring

Monitoring your server is another crucial factor to take into account when renting a Linux server. What level of monitoring does the platform allow. Of course, there are bonus points for alerting as well.

Services like Cloud Log from Amazon are more and more commonplace across all vendors. They give you a very fine-grained glimpse of your systems health and availability. Third party services have also popped up to help you take advantage of this. You just sign up for them and they tap into the metrics and offer them to you in terms of  intuitive graphs and alerts.

Support and Community

With Linux, disaster is not a matter of “If it happens” but “When it happens”. When you inevitably run into an issue, you need to make sure that the vendor offers affordable and timely support to get you out of the mess. Moreover, when things go wrong on your cloud provider’s end you should get an immediate alert about it. You will be thankful for a communicative vendor when things go wrong. On the other hand, lack of communication can lead to frustration and anxiety.

If support contracts are expensive for you, consider opting for a vendor around which there is an active community of developers and operators. People who have, probably, solved the problem that you are facing or who can point you in the right direction. If you adopt an arcane, and poorly documented technology, you are out on your own. This is true with any technology, in general, but especially so with platforms that are controlled by another party.

Compliance

Standards like HIPAA and PCI are a rabbit-hole of their own. Whether or not you see any merit in them, is a different matter. The plain fact of the matter is that if you are designing products that need to meet certain legal standards, then you better dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s.

Consult with the experts and talk to your vendor about it. See, if their infrastructure meets the various standards you need to comply with before making a business decision.

Conclusion

Thanks to the ever growing rate of open source projects, renting a Linux server across any cloud platform is not much of a technical hinderance. The decision really boils down to economics, geo-location, legalities and personal preference.

On that note, I hope you found the above factors conducive to thought. I hope that it will help you select your perfect platform.

With that in mind, I would always suggest users to look for alternative to deploy their applications and run their websites. This makes the IT personnel more agile, as they can work across a wide range of platforms and it makes your application platform independent. Let’s look at some such alternatives and see what they have to offer.

1. LunaNode — For everyone from power users to beginners

Using LunaNode has been pure pleasure! Clean and intuitive GUI, feature-rich platform with a whole range of supported operating systems and apps. Seriously, there’s little I can say here that will be as compelling as checking out their service first-hand! So I strongly recommend you do that first.

The pricing is very competitive against vendors like DigitalOcean, so you don’t have to worry about any surprise bills. You can spin up a whole range of virtual machines straight from a pre-existing template, like you do on any other cloud platform, or, you can install an operating system from ground up.

Most vendors try their best to hide away console access and direct interaction with the virtualization environment, not LunaNode. LunaNode encourages you to upload your own custom VM images or install the operating system right from the ISO file like you would do on your physical machine or VirtualBox. This means you can go very deep in the stack with your VM. Personally, I am a FreeBSD user and I was pleased to see FreeBSD templates and ISOs.

DevOps personnel would find an absolute delight in the automation provided by their startup scripts feature. Every time you create a new VM, you don’t want to do repeated tasks such as creating users, updating packages, etc. LunaNode allows you to add bash scripts or cloud-init scripts which can configure the VMs, everytime you launch a new one.

To sum it up, LunaNode offers:

1. Clean UI — Everything from creating VMs, to monitoring and managing them is super simple. If you find AWS console clunky and time consuming, then this is the exact opposite of that.

2. API Access — Most people who are going to use LunaNode, are programmers and admins. Well, a flexible feature rich API is a lot faster for professional, these users. LunaNode offers secure API access for those needs as well.

3. Easy automation using the technology of your choice — Bash or Cloud-init

4. Competitive pricing — It is slightly cheaper than the mainstream vendors. You can get started for as little as $3.5 per month on their memory optimized nodes. You can scale from there to anywhere upto 16 CPUs and 64 GB of memory. No surprise bills.

5. Data centers in the EU and North America regions. I hope they spin up more servers in the future.

6. Block Storage, Backups and Snapshots so you don’t lose valuable data.

7. DDoS protection, or as they like to call it; Anti DDoS. If any of your assets are sitting on an Internet facing server, you need DDoS protection.

There are also a tonne of other services and features everything from DNS management to floating IPs and affinity groups so you don’t miss out on anything that the mainstream vendors offer, except maybe everything is a lot easier. Check the LunaNode home page here.

2. Linode

Linode has been around for a long time. It has been one of the strongest competitors to DigitalOcean and Vultr. With quick to deploy SSDs and world-wide network of data centers. However, it has a very Linux centric bias. It supports a wide range of Linux distros but nothing else. Disappointingly, installing FreeBSD is not at all a straight-forward process. That immediately raises a red flag for me.

To install FreeBSD, or any other custom OS, you would have to jump through a lot of hoops. The user experience is simple and smooth as long as you are doing what the designers of that UI wanted you to do. Anything out of the ordinary will require a lot of workaround and can possibly break the VM. This is quite unlike LunaNode, where the UI let’s you do a lot more with your virtualized resources.

The pricing is similar to DigitalOcean’s. You can start off with a minimum of $5 per month VM and scale upwards from there. All the usual cloud-related features, like DNS, block storage, etc are available.

Linode wins out with more widespread infrastructure and years of experience in the cloud reliable, in that regard it is an exact replacement for DigitalOcean. However, it also has the same slightly higher pricing and there’s nothing really unique in their offerings. It is almost the same exact service as DigitalOcean or Vultr. Check out the Linode home page.

3. Vultr

Leading the example of Linode, Vultr tries its best to not do anything out of the norm. The same old pricing that you expect from mainstream vendors and the same set of features. It has one of the better user interfaces in the market and is slightly cheaper than Linode. One arena where it wins out is in its offers of bare metal servers.

That’s right! Instead of being confined to a VM, you can get access to the bare metal server with complete control over the underlying CPU, memory and other resources. That combined with the fact that Vultr offers a versatile range of operating systems. Available operating systems include a range of Linux distros from Ubuntu , Fedora and other Linux distros to Windows, FreeBSD and OpenBSD makes Vultr quite an appealing option for power users.

Especially, if your workload is mission critical, you can distribute it across different VMs with different underlying operating systems. This makes your application much more resilient to security threats. If there’s a threat to Linux nodes, you can turn those systems down and patch them while the BSDs or the Windows VMs are still handling the business.

Disappointingly enough, the hardware that the platform offers is not that modern. Their advertised Skylake CPU, even for bare metal servers, are a couple of generations old at the time of this writing. If you are considering this as an option, wait for them to upgrade. Vultr home page can be found here.

Final Verdict

In the final analysis of things, LunaNode wins over the rest of the platforms. For professional workloads you will need DDoS protection, because Internet facing servers get DDoSed, period. Its intuitive UI and really permissive console access allows you to pick and choose the distribution of your choice and finally the pricing is at par, if not cheaper, than most mainstream players.

They have data centers in France and Canada, however, I have used it from Asia Pacific region without any noticeable latency whatsoever.