Storage pricing pages offer a tempting pattern: the normal tier, and next to it an archive tier at a quarter of the price. Same gigabytes, same durability claims. The discount is real, but it is not free - cold tiers are a different product wearing the same units, and the difference is the part priced in small print.
What hot and cold actually mean
Hot storage is what you picture: files available instantly, over every access route, retrieved as often as you like. You pay a flat rate for space and the files behave like files.
Cold storage optimises for the opposite case - data written once and almost never touched. The provider parks it on cheaper infrastructure, and in exchange the touching becomes the expensive part. The headline rate covers keeping the bytes; getting them back again is metered separately.
Where the discount comes from
Four mechanisms, appearing in various combinations across providers:
Retrieval fees. A per-gigabyte charge for reading your own data back, frequently larger per event than months of the storage saving. This compounds with ordinary egress charges where those exist - the cloud bill’s classic ambush, twice.
Thaw delays. The deepest tiers do not return files on click; restores take hours, sometimes half a day. Fine for an archive, absurd the day you need one contract during a meeting.
Minimum storage duration. Objects deleted before 90 or 180 days bill for the full term anyway. Cold tiers punish churn by design - they are for data that stays put.
Access-route limits. Archived objects generally stop being reachable through the routes working files enjoy - no mounting, no instant preview, no share link that just works. The file has left the workflow; a restore step now stands between you and it.
The arithmetic that decides it
The comparison is one honest estimate: how much of this data will you actually read back, and how often?
The pattern that follows from the fee structure: cold pricing rewards archives you rarely and partially restore, and punishes the restore-everything event. A worked example with a terabyte: at typical rates, archiving saves a few pounds a month; a full retrieval can cost a year of those savings in an afternoon. If your realistic restore is “a folder now and then”, cold wins steadily. If it is “everything, urgently, after a disaster”, the discount was a loan against your worst day - which is precisely when restore speed already matters most.
Candidates that genuinely fit cold: compliance retention with fixed terms, raw footage after delivery, the archived masters of closed projects, scientific data kept against the possibility of re-analysis. What does not fit: anything in your working backup rotation, because backups exist to be restored, and a backup you hesitate to restore from over cost has failed at its one job.
Where we stand on tiers
dosya deliberately keeps one temperature: every file is hot, retrieval is free, and there are no egress fees or minimum durations - the pricing is the storage rate and the end of the bill. The trade-off runs the other way: providers with true deep-archive tiers can beat our at-rest rate for petabyte-scale cold data, and for that shape of problem they are the right tool. What we decline to offer is the version where the discount arrives first and the fee schedule explains itself during an emergency restore.
Choosing in three questions
Will this data sit untouched for a year or more? Could you predict, today, which fraction you would ever restore? Can a restore wait half a day? Three yeses and a cold tier somewhere will genuinely save you money - go in with the fee schedule read and the restore tested once. Any no, and the archive discount is a product for someone else’s data; keep yours warm, where the price of touching it is zero and the day you need it back is just a download.
Frequently asked questions
What is cold storage in cloud terms?
A cheaper tier for data you rarely touch. The storage rate drops, and in exchange retrievals are metered, sometimes delayed by hours, and objects often carry minimum storage durations.
Why is cold storage so cheap?
The discount is financed by the fee schedule: per-gigabyte retrieval charges, thaw delays on the deepest tiers, and minimum terms that bill deleted objects for the full duration anyway.
Should backups go in cold storage?
Usually not. Backups exist to be restored, and a full restore from a cold tier can cost more than years of the storage savings. Cold suits archives you rarely and partially retrieve.
