Is there a single point of reference to compare cost of object (or “blob”) storage on various clouds?
Yes! But it is a conditional sort of Yes for two reasons. First: This link gets us to an informative comparison table accurate on 07-October-2024… but this resource might become out of date over time. If so you would be wise to do a new search. Notice that the cheaper services can reduce your cost by a factor of four in comparison with AWS S3 object storage… but there can be data access advantages to having your data on AWS, for example if that is where you build your compute infrastructure. The meta-question is really “How is my project data volume going to translate to cloud spend?” More on this below.
The second remark now: Please notice (at the above link) that object storage has a base cost and then also qualifiers in the other columns. What does it mean? Well there might be tiers of storage for example that become cheaper the less you need to access what is stored. There may be a cost associated with downloading data from the cloud; or for accessing data within the cloud. Cloud account “fine print” often includes an egress waiver that results in no cost for download; and so on. When in doubt: You can always engage with us at CloudBank or reach out to the cloud provider if internet searches aren’t getting you to a clear answer.
All this leads to our main suggestion concerning cloud object storage: If your data volume is in the ballpark range of Gigabytes to tens of Terabytes: A “back of the envelope” calculation is a good idea to make sure your object storage and access will not break your cloud budget. In this data volume range we find that this is typically the case. But when your data volume starts getting up into tens or hundreds of Terabytes or even to Petabytes: Put the envelope away and do a serious and sober engineering evaluation of your data needs and costs in relation to your anticipated data volume.