Your new S3 alternative: Telnyx Cloud Storage

Businesses across the globe rely on Amazon's S3 cloud object storage to support core parts of their operations and products. So it's no surprise that many feel beholden to S3, and reluctant to move to an S3 alternative.

Today, we'll dive into some of S3's shortcomings in detail, and show businesses why they should consider switching to Telnyx Cloud Storage.

What is object storage?

Object storage is a data storage paradigm that packages every file as an individual object with relevant metadata and a unique identifier. This stands in contrast with traditional file systems, where hierarchies and folder structures dictate data management.

The key advantage of object storage is that each object's identifier can be used to access both the file and its metadata programmatically. This opens up a plethora of API-enabled file actions, built around downloading, listing, modifying, and uploading files inside of a software application.

Object storage has grown in popularity as organizations have built more and more applications, experiences and tools—both internal- and external-facing—that rely on serving files to users in a programmatic way. Some examples of object storage use cases include:

• Data lakes: central repositories of an organization's data in its raw, unprocessed state, which can be accessed by other functions, applications and tools within the organization for the purpose of analytics and training machine learning algorithms.
• Backup & restore services: comprehensive stored copies of critical organizational data for a business, updated at regular intervals, and structured to allow for fast disaster recovery in the event that on-premise data is lost.
• Cloud-native applications: data-rich applications that run in cloud servers instead of on-premise or bare-metal servers, allowing for greater scalability and portability.
• Content delivery networks: massively distributed networks of content storage that serve files to end-users from a geographically close location, minimizing latency for a smoother end-user experience.

Amazon S3 vs Telnyx Cloud Storage

While it's fair to say that Amazon S3 is a widely-popular and widely-used object storage service, it's not the only option for businesses looking for cloud object storage. Telnyx Cloud Storage is a lower-cost alternative, built to empower more businesses to build the next generation of connected experiences.

Some of the key factors in Amazon S3 vs Telnyx Cloud Storage include:

• Cost
• Egress fees
• Free storage tiers
• Service & support

Reasons to migrate

Businesses using S3 should re-examine their usage and consider several key factors and differences between S3 and a competing service like Telnyx Cloud Storage, especially in light of increased economic uncertainty. Factors like cost savings, egress fees and migration support all play a role in determining the right object storage solution for businesses.

Lower cost

Telnyx Cloud Storage boasts lower-cost storage than Amazon S3. A breakdown of the key differences in entry-level storage pricing is shown in the table below:

As shown in the table, the basic price to store 1GB of data on Telnyx Cloud Storage represents more than a 60% cost saving compared to storing that same gigabyte of data on Amazon S3. What's more, operations on objects (common in programmable file-serving and file-management applications) are also priced lower on Telnyx Cloud Storage than on Amazon S3.

It's important to note that S3 has several other storage tiers, including standard tiers that reduce their price to $0.021 / GB / month for stored data in excess of 500TB. That reduced tier is still significantly more expensive than Telnyx Cloud Storage's single, simple price---and that's before you factor in egress fees.

More complex tiers of Amazon S3's pricing structure involve restrictions on how frequently data can be accessed, the latency with which data can be accessed, and the regions in which data can be stored.

Free storage tiers

Both Amazon S3 and Telnyx Cloud Storage have free tiers in order to help prospective users try out their services without committing to large expenditures. An outline of these free tiers is shown in the table below:

It's clear that Amazon S3's free tier is severely limited compared to that of Telnyx Cloud Storage. Critically, S3's free tier puts extremely low limits on the number of operations that can be carried out on stored files.

In doing this, S3's free tier cuts off support for the vast majority of cloud-native use cases based around programmatic file operations, like data lakes and content delivery networks. By providing 50X more file operations in our free tier, Telnyx Cloud Storage allows organizations building these next-generation cloud-native apps to test out our product and APIs in a meaningful way, instead of locking them into an expensive commitment before unlocking key testing functionality.

Migration & development support

Amazon S3 is arguably the biggest name in object storage, and serves the vast majority of the market. This presents a significant problem for small companies, start-ups, organizations with unique use-cases, or even established companies seeking to migrate from on-premise to cloud-native storage.

These companies run into a wall of unhelpful support and a lack of appealing scale-up options from large cloud providers like S3, because these large cloud providers are more focused on serving their largest-paying customers.

Telnyx Cloud Storage is built to help companies start up, scale up, migrate to the cloud, or build next-generation cloud-native experiences—no matter their company size or monthly cloud spend.

Our migration experts, solutions engineers and in-house network operations center (NOC) help our customers with code examples, proof-of-concept applications, integrations, and in migrating their apps and data from other cloud providers to Telnyx Cloud Storage.

This hands-on expertise, service and support is critical in ensuring companies of all sizes can get up and running quickly and smoothly, and start enjoying the cost savings from more affordable cloud storage.

Try Telnyx Cloud Storage today: enjoy our scale-friendly free tier by signing up for a Telnyx account and logging into the Mission Control Portal. If you'd prefer to do more research first, check out our product specs and API documentation, or talk to a storage expert to learn more.

Amazon S3 pricing retrieved from aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing on 11/18/2022. All Amazon S3 prices assume data is stored in US-East-1 (Ohio) using S3 Standard storage class. Telnyx Storage pricing retrieved on 12/15/2022.