I think you are right about “general network usage” costs, and I hadn’t caught that before. Thanks for letting me know.
And you may well be right that Oracle Cloud Archive is a great deal, but I’m still wary, for two reasons:
- I’ve find multiple third-party sites that tell me retrieval is free, but the only Oracle Cloud Storage pricing that I can find on Oracle’s website, does not say that (at least not anywhere that I can find).
- I don’t understand the Oracle pricing model. With AWS and GCS the structure is clear: if you STORE data and don’t do stuff with it, they’ll charge you way less for “cold” storage. However, if you try to regular read, move, retrieve or just generally do stuff with that data, there are HUGE fees. So far, what you are telling me is that with Oracle there aren’t any transaction costs, and retrieval is free. What, then, is different about Oracle’s hot storage? Why would anyone use it? Honestly, it seems too good to be true: all Ihave to do is choose the “archive” category and suddenly it’s just cheaper all around. That’s not how AWS and GCS work at all: for them, when you tick that box there are lots of gotchas. Indeed, you found one on GCS that I had missed!
Before choosing the GCS “autoclass” I read multiple posts of people backing up to GCS cold storage and being hit with big fees because, for example, their backup program was downloading some metadata, or to was deleting files that they got charged for 12-months of storage. So I may have made a mistake, but I chose autoclass to avoid those gotcha. I know I’ll pay much higher storage costs for the first year, as google migrates my data to colder and colder storage, and I already knew that retrieval would cost me something.
Honestly, if I could find some confirmation that Oracle wasn’t going to hit me with fees, I’d be interested in trying them out. But the thing that really makes me worry, is that compared to AWS and GCS, they say very little on their website about what things cost. If I do their cost calculator on archive storage, it ONLY shows me the cost to store? But you are going to be running backups, perhaps even prunes – this is going to require reading the data, and I just don’t see how they can make that free white also charging so much less for the storage.
Please do report back on your experiences!