Walters says cloud storage fills a void for customers who need affordable storage for archiving, backup and disaster recovery purposes. Offering storage as a service via a “utility billing methodology” is a smart move for hosting providers such as The Planet and solution providers who deliver the services.

He says The Planet uses a fairly typical cloud pricing model, charging based on capacity used and the amount of bandwidth a customer needs to access their capacity. But where pricing “surprises” occur with other providers is when customers make demands to their data, and are charged for each request.

“At first it seems pretty cheap, because it’s a ‘pay-as-you-go-for-only-what-you-use’ model. But then you realize that you’re making a lot of requests to call up that stored data – maybe you even write an application to automate calls to that data – and it starts to add up,” Walters says. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, or S3, charges per request in addition to standard capacity and bandwidth fees. But that doesn’t mean you should write off vendors based on different pricing models and fees if their offerings fit your customers' needs.

Often, it’s less a matter of cost than the types of data customers need to store.