Submitted by Corey Pennycuff on
For a recent project, I needed to find a good, reliable, and inexpensive cloud storage solution to integrate with my Drupal site. As we know, developers are creatures of habit, and we often reuse the same solutions for similar problems. In looking for cloud storage solution, I first went to the two main competitors: Amazon S3 and Rackspace.
I don't want to spend a lot of time on this topic, but I will say, first of all, that both companies are excellent choices and well-respected providers of cloud storage service. Both of them even have similar pricing. As it turns out, pricing was the major issue and the Achilles' heel of my project. In the worst case scenario, it was just too expensive to use either of them for cloud storage, and in the best case profits would be too slim to offset the worst-case threat.
Enter DreamHost. DreamHost has been in the web hosting business for a long time, but they have only recently launched their cloud storage solution called DreamObjects. Their pricing is what really got my attention, however. Their transfer cost is almost half of the "big boys", and the monthly storage cost per GB was similarly low. All told, DreamHost DreamObjects was the choice that could keep my project's costs low despite its complexity and massive storage requirements.
In the spirit of open-source development, I released my code on the Drupal.org website as a contributed module named Storage API DreamHost DreamObjects (you can browse the source code here). The module seamlessly integrates into the framework of the pre-existing Storage API module, which, in turn, makes Drupal's file handling capabilities very flexible and powerful.
If you need a cloud storage solution, I would recommend that you try DreamHost DreamObjects and benefit from their reduced-cost storage solution. (No, I am not affiliated with DreamHost in any way.)