Off-host backup cost comparison — B2, S3, Wasabi, and the DIY option

For a single LYLIX VPS doing nightly off-host backups, the storage bill is a small line item but worth thinking through before you pick a target. The default answer most operators reach for is "S3" and that's often the most expensive choice. This article compares the realistic options at small-to-medium scale (10 GB to 5 TB stored, monthly egress in the same ballpark) and tells you which one fits which workload.

The price model that matters

Three numbers to compare across providers:

1. Storage ($/TB/month) — what you pay to keep data sitting there.
2. Egress ($/GB downloaded) — what you pay during a restore. Often the surprise cost.
3. API operations ($/1000 requests) — usually trivial for backup workloads, but worth checking on providers with aggressive request-rate fees.

Backup workloads are write-heavy and rarely read until you need a restore. Egress dominates the bill ONLY during a disaster — most months it's $0. But that disaster-month cost is the one you'd rather not be surprised by.

The contenders

Prices are approximate as of mid-2026 and shift; check provider sites for current numbers. The relative ranking is more stable than the absolute prices.

Pick by scenario

Single VPS, < 100 GB, infrequent restore — Backblaze B2

The default answer for most operators. Storage is cheap, the free-egress allowance covers occasional restores, the API is S3-compatible (works with restic, borg, rclone, every backup tool). The dedicated article on restic with B2 has the full setup.

VPS with regular partial restores (e.g. file-recovery requests) — Wasabi

Wasabi's zero-egress pricing wins when you're pulling data back regularly. The 90-day minimum retention is a gotcha for high-churn backup sets (lots of files added and quickly deleted) but doesn't affect typical backup rotation.

Cold archive, restore once a year if ever — AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Lowest storage cost by far. The 12-hour retrieval delay and per-GB retrieval fee mean this is wrong for backups you might need quickly — but right for "I need to keep this for 7 years for compliance reasons." Don't use it for active disaster-recovery backups.

Multi-VPS fleet — rsync.net or self-hosted

At fleet scale, native SSH-based storage (rsync.net or a dedicated LYLIX VPS configured as a borg/restic repo server) often wins on simplicity. One credential set, no API surface, transparent costs.

"I just want one bill, one provider" — your existing cloud

If you're already paying AWS for something else and you want one invoice, S3 Standard works fine — you'll just pay more than the alternatives. The non-cost argument for staying on your existing cloud is real (one less account, one less monitoring integration) and worth the premium for some operators.

The DR caveat for same-datacenter storage

If you back up a LYLIX VPS to another LYLIX VPS in the same datacenter, you have off-host backup but not off-datacenter backup. A datacenter-level event (rare but not impossible — fire, network partition, power) takes both. For real DR, the target should be in a different physical location: a cloud provider in a different region, rsync.net (multi-DC by design), Backblaze B2 (their own datacenters), etc.

Sizing your storage estimate

Backup tools that use deduplication and compression (restic, borg) typically store 0.3–0.7× the source size after a few months of rotations, depending on how compressible your data is. A 50 GB VPS with normal mixed content tends to settle around 20–35 GB stored regardless of how many archives you keep.

For pricing math:

• 50 GB VPS, ~30 GB stored, B2 = ~$0.18/month.
• 500 GB VPS, ~250 GB stored, B2 = ~$1.50/month.
• 2 TB VPS, ~1 TB stored, B2 = ~$6/month.

Within an order of magnitude of "less than a coffee per month" for most LYLIX VPS sizes. Don't agonize — pick one of the cheap options, validate restores work, move on.