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Rabata
Rabata

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We benchmarked 10+ S3 providers — here's what the numbers actually show

With so many S3-compatible providers on the market, it can be difficult to understand which one truly fits your workload.

To keep things objective, we used MinIO warp v1.0.7, a widely adopted open-source benchmarking tool. Tests included upload, download, mixed workloads, small object throughput, and large object handling. All benchmarks were run under identical conditions on a Debian 13 VM with 16 GB RAM, located in US-East-1, using 8 concurrent threads and consistent object sizes.

Our methodology is fully reproducible — every parameter and setup detail is publicly available. You can find the complete benchmark methodology and replication guide with step-by-step instructions to run your own tests. All pricing information reflects rates publicly available as of October 1, 2025.

Here's the summary:

S3 Storage Providers<br>
Performance Comparison
A few things that surprised us:

  • Mixed operations (simultaneous reads, writes, metadata) is the most realistic measure of real-world performance — and results vary wildly
  • Cloudflare R2 has zero egress fees but came in last on mixed ops (44 Mbit/s) and small objects (42 obj/s)
  • Hetzner's numbers look low — but that's because we tested from US-East-1 and they're EU-only, so transatlantic latency skews the results
  • Backblaze B2 dominates on downloads but showed timeouts during large-object tests

For full per-provider breakdowns and detailed analysis: https://rabata.io/s3-comparison

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