What is Wasabi Cloud Storage?
Wasabi Cloud is a universal, one size fits all cloud object storage service that eliminates confusing storage tiers and satisfies nearly all storage performance requirements. Hot Cloud Storage costs less than traditional cold storage service and is significantly faster than traditional frequent-access storage services.
Wasabi is a new player in the SaaS market, Wasabi gets a lot right when it comes to features and for the price you get all these benefits it’s just awesome!
Wasabi Cloud Storage Pricing
Of Wasabi’s two claims over Amazon S3, the easiest to verify is its pricing structure. And, as promised, it is cheap.
| Storage | Egress (downloading) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost: | $0.0039 per GB | $0.04 per GB |
| Notes: | 1TB minimum |
Wasabi recently launched new default pricing that’s $0.0049 per gigabyte per month. That works out to about $5 per terabyte, which is a steal.
The downside is that you have to pay for at least 1TB each month, even if you don’t use that much. However, given that Amazon S3, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure cost over four times as much, that’s probably an afterthought.
The crux of the new pricing is that Wasabi no longer charges for egress — or file downloading. That’s a charge you’ll find with just about every other cloud IaaS solution.
If you prefer the old Wasabi pricing structure, you can still sign up for it, too. Under those terms, the base storage price is $0.0039 per gigabyte per month.
Legacy pricing does include egress fees, which amount to $0.04 per gigabyte downloaded. That means that if you download 1TB of data from Wasabi, it’ll cost you $40 to do so.
That’s cheaper than Amazon, Azure and Google Cloud, but twice as much as Backblaze B2, which charges $0.02 per gigabyte.
We suggest opting for the new pricing if you download frequently. You can, however, switch between the pricing options later if you decide you made a mistake.
Overall, Wasabi’s pricing should appeal to businesses on a budget. It’s even priced low enough to make for an affordable home backup solution, even with the $30 one-time charge for CloudBerry Backup.
Ease of Use
Signing up for Wasabi takes a few minutes at most. In our case, we created a trial account, which prompted an verification email to create an account password.
Once logged into your new account on the Wasabi website, you’ll need to create a bucket (a data repository) in order start backing up data. You can create as many buckets as you want.
You’ll need to give your bucket a name. There’s also a drop-down menu to select a region, which refers to the data center location. As mentioned, right now the only location is US-East (Ashburn, VA), with a US-West facility opening in early 2018.
You’ll also be given the option to enable or suspend versioning and logging. Versioning refers saving past copies of altered files, in case you want to rollback changes. You can switch both settings later, if needed.
The final step for creating a bucket is to review your selections and hit the “create bucket” button.
You can upload folders and files directly to your newly created Wasabi bucket if you want to.
Speed
Wasabi makes some bold speed claims, including being six times faster than Amazon S3. In particular, on its website, Wasabi claims to write 456MB of data in five seconds, compared to 75MB for Amazon S3.
For most users, it’s unlikely Wasabi’s reported speeds will be touched. That’s especially true using WiFi. If your WiFi upload speeds are 10 Mbps, for example, the absolute fastest you could upload a 1000MB of data using a single thread is just over 14 minutes.
We conducted our own tests to see how quickly we could upload and download files using Wasabi. For these tests, we used a 1GB folder and worked over a WiFi network with 10 Mbps upload and 22 Mbps download speeds.
Here are our results:
| Test One | Test Two | Average | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upload: | 19 minutes | 19 minutes | 19 minutes |
| Download | 11 minutes | 12 minutes | 11.5 minutes |
Security
Wasabi stores your data in hardened data centers designed to thwart both physical and virtual attacks. The data centers are tier four, which is the Uptime Institute’s highest rating with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. Security patrols are onsite 24/7 and backed by CCTV surveillance. Biometric scanners help keep trespassers out, as well.
Data is encrypted at rest in the Wasabi cloud, even if you’re not encrypting through your online backup software. HTTPS is also used to secure uploads and downloads from online eavesdropping through man-in-the-middle attacks and the like.
Difference between Amazon S3 and Wasabi :
| AMAZON S3 | WASABI |
|---|---|
| It is owned by Amazon. | It is owned by Wasabi Technologies Incorporation. |
| It was launched in 2006. | It was launched in 2017. |
| It was developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). | It was developed by Wasabi Tech Inc. |
| It does not offer free storage space. | It also does not offer free storage space. |
| It offers 5 GB for 12 month free trial. | It does not offer free trial. |
| It provides unlimited maximum storage space for paid. | It also provides unlimited maximum storage space for paid. |
| It has the unlimited maximum storage size. | Maximum storage size is unlimited here also. |
| It requires credit-card details for free trial. | It does not require credit-card details as it does not provide free trial. |
| Developer API is REST and SOAP. | It supports developer API. |
| It has Amazon S3 limit as traffic or band-width limit. | It has no traffic or band-width limit. |
| Maximum file size is 5 GB here. | Here maximum file size has no restrictions. |
| It charges comparatively more for additional storage space that means it is more costly. | It charges less for paid storage space that means it is less costly |
Final Verdict
Wasabi is not only significantly cheaper than Amazon, for most users it’s going to represent better value than even budget-friendly Backblaze B2. Beyond that, the service is easy to use, the security looks solid and the support seems responsive.
