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 ..