What is the Most Affordable Backup Storage for Your Website?
One of the most important services Watchful can provide for you is reliable site backups. No matter what happens, if you have trustworthy site backups, you can recover. So it’s a big advantage if you can find affordable backup storage for your sites.
We looked around at over a dozen of the best backup storage services, and figured out how much they all cost. We also noted if that service works with the popular XCloner plugin.
It turns out there’s a huge variation in prices. Depending on your choice, 1 GB of storage can cost as little as $0.005 or as much as $1. We looked at the best options for three different pricing models:
- Pay-as-you-go storage
- Free storage
- Flat fee storage
#1. Pay-as-you-go storage
This Pay-as-you-go model is the one we use here at Watchful. It allows you to scale up-and-down, paying only for what you need. Four of the most famous services use this pay-as-you-go pricing model.
These results were surprising to me. I knew Amazon S3 was expensive, but I didn’t realize it was more than four times as expensive as Backblaze and twice as expensive as Azure.
| Service | Price per GB | Supported in XCloner |
| Backblaze B2 | $0.005 | Yes, details here |
| Microsoft Azure | $0.010 | Yes, details here |
| Google Cloud | $0.020 | Not yet |
| Amazon S3 | $0.021 | Yes, details here |
#2. Free storage
Next, we looked at nine different services that have a free option. Google Drive was the winner here, offering more than seven times more storage than Dropbox.
| Free Capacity (GB) | Supported in XCloner | |
| Google Drive | 15 | Yes, details here |
| Box | 10 | Yes, details here |
| pCloud | 10 | Yes, details here |
| IceDrive | 10 | Yes, details here |
| Yandex.Disk | 10 | Yes, details here |
| Microsoft OneDrive | 5 | Yes, details here |
| IDrive | 5 | Yes, details here |
| Koofr | 2 | Yes, details here |
| Dropbox | 2 | Yes, details here |
#3. Flat fee storage
Next, let’s we looked at the paid version of those nine services above. This table includes their cheapest paid service. This model is more normally more expensive when it comes to price per GB, but you are guaranteed never to have sudden cost overages.
Again, you can see a vast difference in price for what is simply storage. IDrive is remarkably cheap. And whereas Dropbox has a very limited free plans, its paid option is a bargain compared to some of the alternatives.
| Annual Price | Capacity (GB) | Price per GB | Supported in XCloner | |
| IDrive | $52.12 | 2000 | $0.026 | Yes, details here |
| Dropbox | $119.88 | 2048 | $0.059 | Yes, details here |
| pCloud | $47.88 | 500 | $0.096 | Yes, details here |
| IceDrive | $19.99 | 150 | $0.133 | Yes, details here |
| Google Drive | $19.99 | 100 | $0.200 | Yes, details coming soon |
| Yandex.Disk | $20.40 | 100 | $0.204 | Yes, details here |
| Microsoft OneDrive | $23.88 | 100 | $0.239 | Yes, details here |
| Koofr | $6.55 | 10 | $0.655 | Yes, details here |
| Box | $100.00 | 100 | $1.000 | Yes, details here |
The winners
- Pay-as-you-go storage: Backblaze, $0.005 per GB
- Free storage: Google Drive, 15 GB
- Flat fee storage: IDrive, $0.026 per GB
Watchful and site backups
We take backups incredibly seriously here at Watchful. Here’s a quick overview of some key options:
You have the choice of three different ways to backup sites.
If you use Watchful for Joomla sites, you can use Akeeba Backup. We also support Akeeba for WordPress, plus recently added All-in-One Migration and the XCloner plugin.
You can get notifications for failed website backups and also if your site doesn’t have a recent backup.
Over to you …
Do you rely on any of these services for your backups? Are there others that we should add to this list?
Do you have any strong recommendations for storing your backup files?
Let us know in the comments below …
17 Comments
Dan Walker · July 15, 2020 at 8:30 PM
Amazon S3 is the best and cheapest if you know how to use it.
Joe Campbell · July 7, 2020 at 9:08 AM
I prefer using Dropbox, as it offers a number of valuable features such as Selective Sync (which allows me to offload files from my HD to the cloud)
Vic Drover · July 8, 2020 at 8:18 AM
Yes, Dropbox has excellent desktop support. Google Drive can be used in this way also with the Backup & Sync utility they have.
johan peters · July 7, 2020 at 8:50 AM
Will joomla be supported in the future?
Softaculous xcloner is out of date (2 years)
Download (registration) not possible from xcloner website.
Pro / con akeeba vs xcloner joomla and wordpres
Vic Drover · July 8, 2020 at 8:19 AM
Hi Johan,
We’re focused on XCloner for WordPress currently. Can you tell me the issue you are having signing up for an account on XCloner.com?
johan peters · July 9, 2020 at 1:01 AM
i tried it again, and now it works…
Yannick Gaultier · July 7, 2020 at 8:36 AM
Hi Steve and Vic,
One strong contender in that field is Wasabi. About the same pricing as B2 but it uses an S3-compatible interface so any software able to upload to S3 is basically compatible with Wasabi, provided the target root URL can be changed.
Their only – odd – pricing issue is that they charge you for any deleted data for 90 days or so but end prices is still pretty competitive.
Cheers
Vic Drover · July 7, 2020 at 8:41 AM
Super-interesting Yannick! Sounds like plugins and extensions would need a specific connector for Wasabi as I can’t find any WebDAV support.
Yannick Gaultier · July 7, 2020 at 8:51 AM
Data transfer is done using the Amazon S3 protocol. So xCloner being already able to handle Amazon S3 transfer, becoming compatible with Wasabi is only a matter of using the same code than Amazon S3 but pointing the requests at s3.wasabi.com instead of s3.amazon.com.
Then whatever is uploaded can be downloaded in the same way by the S3-compatible app. Or user can just login to the Wasabi control panel and browse content, download, upload manually, etc
Steve Burge · July 8, 2020 at 6:43 PM
Awesome idea, thanks Yannick. The Wasabi prices do look very competitive.
Marcus Stafford · July 7, 2020 at 7:44 AM
We’ve got 2tb with Dropbox and Akeeba uploads the (J!, WP and other) backups automatically to a specific folder and deletes after 30 days. Never run out of space and never had an issue. It only costs £95.88 per year and there are currently over 1000 backups sitting there with 500gb of space remaining.
Vic Drover · July 7, 2020 at 7:46 AM
Fantastic!
Chris · July 7, 2020 at 7:37 AM
shame you did not include Amazon S3 in the list
Steve Burge · July 7, 2020 at 7:55 AM
Hi Chris. Amazon should be in the Pay-as-you-go chart at the top.
Vic Drover · July 7, 2020 at 7:56 AM
Amazon S3 is in the first
Pay As You Gosection. We love Amazon S3, but it’s definitely not the cheapest these days. What do you like about S3 ?Matt · July 7, 2020 at 8:00 AM
Looks to be under Pay-as-you-go storage
Matt · July 7, 2020 at 9:18 AM
Amazon S3 is cheapest if you set rules on the bucket to transfer to Glacier cold storage. You can get the price down to $0.004 per GB on Glacier. If you decide to use Glacier Deep Archive, your per GB cost is reduced to $0.00099 per GB.
The only important note on using the above, is that Glacier has extra costs on retrieval and also in terms of time to retrieve. More information on pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/