Quick answer
Is a rented storage server cheaper than Backblaze B2 or Wasabi?
Yes, a rented storage server is cheaper than Backblaze B2 or Wasabi from about 30 TB. At 100 TB on 2 November 2026, B2 cost $695.00 a month and Wasabi $799.00. Basalthold Hold 160 cost $561.39 per 30 days for 128 TB usable in RAIDZ2. Below 30 TB, the cloud costs less. Holds are paid in crypto with no KYC.
What do B2, Wasabi and a rented server charge for?
| Item | Backblaze B2 | Wasabi (pay as you go) | Basalthold hold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage | $6.95 per TB per 30 days; first 10 GB free | $7.99 per TB a month | One price per hold; Hold 160 is $3.50/TB raw |
| Download (egress) | Free up to 3× your average stored data, then $0.01 per GB | Free while monthly egress stays at or below what you store | No fee: 200 TB per 30 days on Hold 160, never billed automatically |
| API calls | Classes A, B and C free; class D $0.004 per 10,000 after 2,500 a day | No fee | None: it is your server |
| Minimum period | None | 90 days per object | One term, from 30 days |
| Minimum charge | None stated | 1 TB a month | A whole hold |
| Who keeps the copies safe | Backblaze | Wasabi | You, with RAID on one machine |
| Crypto payment | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Prices checked on
What does each option cost at 10, 50 and 100 TB?
At 10 TB the cloud wins; at 50 TB and 100 TB a server wins, by a wide margin over S3 and R2. The cloud rows price usable space, redundancy included. The Basalthold row uses the smallest hold that fits with redundancy: a mirror on Hold 24, RAIDZ2 on Hold 100 and Hold 160.
Storage only, per month
| Option | 10 TB | 50 TB | 100 TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | $69.50 | $347.50 | $695.00 |
| Wasabi | $79.90 | $399.50 | $799.00 |
| Cloudflare R2 Standard | $150.00 | $750.00 | $1,500.00 |
| Amazon S3 Standard (US East) | $230.00 | $1,150.00 | $2,251.20 |
| Hetzner Storage Box (boxes of 10 or 20 TB) | €20.80 ($23.24) | €102.00 ($113.95) | €203.00 ($226.79) |
| Basalthold | Hold 24, 12 TB mirrored: $110.99 | Hold 100, 80 TB in RAIDZ2: $377.05 | Hold 160, 128 TB in RAIDZ2: $561.39 |
Prices checked on
A Hetzner Storage Box undercuts everyone, a hold included. It is network storage rather than a server, it stops at 20 TB a box, and Hetzner takes no crypto. Over a year, 100 TB on B2 costs $8,340.00, while twelve months of Hold 160 cost $4,715.67.
What does it cost to download everything once?
A backup is only worth its restore. This table prices one full download of the stored data within a month, on top of storage:
| Option | 10 TB | 50 TB | 100 TB | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free up to 3× average stored data |
| Wasabi | $0 | $0 | $0 | Free while egress ≤ stored data |
| Cloudflare R2 | $0 | $0 | $0 | Egress to the internet is free |
| Amazon S3 Standard | $891.00 | $4,292.70 | $7,812.20 | 100 GB free, then $0.09, $0.085 and $0.07 per GB by tier |
| Hetzner Storage Box | $0 | $0 | $0 | No traffic charge |
| Basalthold | $0 | $0 | $0 | Inside the hold's traffic allowance |
Prices checked on
Egress is where Amazon S3 loses: one full restore of 100 TB costs more than ten months of storage on B2. Time is the other cost. At a full 1 Gbit/s, 10 TB takes 22 hours, 50 TB about 4 days 15 hours and 100 TB about 9 days 6 hours. Those are line-rate calculations; your own downlink sets the real pace. How each provider words its egress rules is compared in What are cloud storage egress fees, and how do I avoid them?
When are Backblaze B2 or Wasabi the better choice?
Below about 30 TB, and whenever you want no machine to run. Their real strengths:
- Small and growing data: B2 bills per byte stored, with the first 10 GB free. A hold is paid whole from day one.
- No hardware to look after: the provider handles failed drives and keeps the copies. On a server, that is your job.
- S3 out of the box: most backup tools speak S3. On a server you install it yourself, as in How do I host my own S3-compatible object storage?
- Free egress on B2: three times your stored data each month covers restore tests.
Watch Wasabi's rules. Objects deleted within 90 days are billed for the remaining days, and every account pays for at least 1 TB. If monthly egress exceeds stored data, Wasabi may limit or suspend the service.
When is a rented storage server the better choice?
From a few dozen terabytes, and when you need more than an object bucket. A server suits you if:
- You store 30 TB or more. The price stays flat as you fill the drives.
- Your tools want SSH, not S3. Borg, rsync, ZFS replication and Proxmox Backup Server all run on the machine itself; see What is the best offsite backup for a NAS?
- You restore often. Downloads stay inside a fixed allowance.
- You pay in crypto. Of 23 storage-server sellers Basalthold checked on 2 November 2026, 16 took crypto. Backblaze and Wasabi take none.
Every hold and its price per term is on the pricing page.
What does a server ask of you that the cloud does not?
With a server, redundancy is your work, on one machine in one building. Build the array, watch drive health and keep the system updated. When a drive fails, open a ticket: the team has it replaced at no cost, and rebuilding the array on the new drive is up to your setup. A storage server is not a backup of itself: we keep no copy of your data anywhere else, so a second copy in another place stays your job.
So a rented server is one copy, not the whole plan. Keep the original at home or in the office, the server as the offsite copy, and encrypt before you send. You can encrypt every data drive with LUKS or ZFS native encryption; the keys stay with you and nobody on the team ever asks for them. A failed 16 TB drive also leaves the pool exposed for a while; How long does a RAID 6 or RAIDZ2 rebuild take? works it out.
What else do people ask when comparing B2, Wasabi and a server?
Which is cheaper, Backblaze B2 or Wasabi?
B2 on storage: $6.95 per TB against Wasabi's $7.99, read on 2 November 2026. Wasabi charges no API fees, but has a 90-day minimum and a 1 TB minimum charge. B2 has neither.
Does Backblaze B2 charge for egress?
Only past three times your average stored data in a month. Above that, Backblaze bills $0.01 per GB.
Can I pay Backblaze or Wasabi in crypto?
No crypto method was listed by either on 2 November 2026. Basalthold takes BTC, USDT, USDC, ETH, SOL, LTC, with no KYC and a $25 minimum top-up.
Where does Cloudflare R2 fit?
R2 charges $0.015 per GB-month and nothing for egress to the internet. Storage alone makes it twice the price of B2 at every size in our table.
Is my data safer in B2 than on one server?
A provider spreads copies across many drives and runs the repairs; a server has your RAID only. Use the server as one of three copies. It is never the only one.
Sources (9)
- B2 Cloud Storage pricing backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing — Backblaze (read 2026-11-02)
- Cloud storage pricing wasabi.com/pricing — Wasabi Technologies (read 2026-11-02)
- Pricing FAQ wasabi.com/pricing/faq — Wasabi Technologies (read 2026-11-02)
- R2 pricing — Cloudflare (read 2026-11-02)
- Amazon S3 pricing — Amazon Web Services (read 2026-11-02)
- Price List API: AmazonS3, us-east-1 (published 15 October 2026) — Amazon Web Services (read 2026-11-02)
- Price List API: AWSDataTransfer, us-east-1 (published 16 September 2026) — Amazon Web Services (read 2026-11-02)
- Storage Box hetzner.com/storage/storage-box — Hetzner Online (read 2026-11-02)
- Euro foreign exchange reference rates — European Central Bank (2026-10-30)