Users of Google’s Cloud Platform utilize it for a very wide range of things, from backing up and archiving data to subbing in for onsite server operations. Thus, it stands to reason that there would be more than one way to store data with the service, and at different price points for different needs. Not only has that been the case for some time, but two new options have been launched as of today. The two new options, Multi-Regional Storage and Coldline Storage, fit two new niches for data access and pricing. On top of the two new options rolling out, the commonly used Regional Storage option has gotten a price drop to 2 cents per gigabyte per month, down about 23% from its previous price. The pricing for the Nearline option remains the same, at 1 cent per gigabyte per month.
The new Coldline option is meant to be used for data that’s accessed less than once a year, and costs only .7 cents per gigabyte per month. Like the other cold storage tier, Nearline, Coldline features a limit on how often you can access the data, and a cost to retrieve it. Per-operation costs are a bit higher than the other tiers, as well. Meant to be used for things like archival, disaster recovery, and long-term data storage, users have a hard limit of one data access per year, with the bare minimum time on ice from when the account starts up being 90 days.
Multi-Regional Storage is meant to be the polar opposite of Coldline. Multi-Regional Storage costs 2.7 cents per GB per month, but has no fees or limits for data access or use. As the name implies, data is held redundantly at Google data centers worldwide, making for super fast access and high bandwidth limits compared to other options. Data is touted as having 99.95% availability on this service tier, and between fast access and geo-redundancy, Google has declared this tier safe for things like serving up web pages and videos, as well as databases and the like. The two new tiers should be available for all customers as of this writing.