How does Object Storage Billing work?

You can find information about Object Storage pricing here. To answer your question directly, I've quoted the "Transfer Quotas" section of our Object Storage pricing guide:

Object Storage adds 1 terabyte of outbound data transfer to your data transfer pool. This 1 terabyte of transfer data is prorated. If you use Object Storage for half of a month, only 500 gigabytes of transfer data will be added to your monthly transfer pool. At this time, all outbound data, including data transfer from Object Storage to a Linode in the same data center, is billable.


You are not charged for uploading objects (inbound traffic) to Object Storage, with a few exceptions. Uploading an object to Object Storage from a Linode is almost always billable, as that is considered outbound traffic from the origin Linode. However, uploading an object from a Linode to Object Storage over IPv6 will be free, provided both the Linode and the bucket are hosted in the same data center. Any further outbound data past your transfer quota is charged at a rate of $0.01 a gigabyte. For more information on network transfer pools, review our Network Transfer Quota guide.

As I understand transferring data to/from an object store is charged even you're in the same data center using IPv4. You guys are comparing your prices with other vendors and saying that you're cheaper. Almost all cases you can not be cheaper than other vendors who're not charging for data transfers in the same DC. You guys should do something on that since we're already paying for storing the data.

You can charge for the traffic between for your other locations and the object store I'll respect that.

Thanks/Gokalp

As I understand transferring data to/from an object store is charged even you're in the same data center using IPv4.

If you're transferring to/from a Linode, then yes. Transferring data to object storage counts towards the Linode's outbound traffic, whilst transferring from object storage counts towards the object storage's outbound traffic.

This is the same as Linode-to-Linode within the same DC if using the public IPv4 addresses not private ones.

Almost all cases you can not be cheaper than other vendors who're not charging for data transfers in the same DC. You guys should do something on that since we're already paying for storing the data.

Whilst other vendors do not charge for transfers in the same DC or zone, most also don't bundle data transfer to other zones or the internet.

I do agree it seems madness to "charge" for data within the same DC (as technically it's not over anyone's links that Linode would have to pay for), however Linode does offer very generous bandwidth allowances that cover this AND egress to other zones and the net, so when comparing, you'd have to factor both into the equation.

I suspect that Linode would still come out cheaper if you used the full bandwidth allowances, which are in the TBs.

Thank you for your detailed answer.

The value you're offering with 1 TB free transfer is worth $10.00 at a rate of $0.01 per gigabyte transfer. Anybody can transfer much more than 1 TB while processing data inside the datacenter from/to a linode and get charged for that.

Product Manager should know about it. To make Linode Object Storage competitive from the beginning it's better change this model before people get charged and pissed off :).

Hey @gcakici! Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Object Storage billing. I've gone ahead and added it to our internal tracker. :)

Hey @rdaniels has anything changed about object store billing ? Or we still use and pay for the Amazon S3 rather than your awesome product.

@gcakici we haven't made changes to our Object Storage billing as of now. That being said, I wanted to point out the below information about transferring via IPv6 from our Object Storage Pricing and Limitations guide.

Uploading an object to Object Storage from a Linode is almost always billable, as that is considered outbound traffic from the origin Linode. However, uploading an object from a Linode to Object Storage over IPv6 will be free, provided both the Linode and the bucket are hosted in the same data center.

We'll be sure to update our blog with any new updates or features!