Most cloud storage providers charge you twice: once to store your data, and again every time you retrieve it. These retrieval charges — called egress fees — are billed per gigabyte downloaded. On AWS S3, that starts at $0.09/GB. On Google Cloud Storage, it is $0.12/GB. At scale, egress fees routinely exceed the cost of storage itself.
This matters most for backup and disaster recovery. The entire point of a backup is to restore it when something goes wrong. If restoring 2 TB of data costs you €180+ in surprise fees on top of your monthly bill, your "affordable" storage is not actually affordable.
Zero egress means you pay a flat monthly fee for your storage tier and nothing extra when you download, restore, or sync data. No per-GB retrieval charges. No bandwidth surcharges. No minimum retention penalties.
This is not the same as "free tier" egress allowances. AWS gives you 100 GB/month free, then charges full rate. Backblaze B2 gives you 3x your stored data free, then $0.01/GB. These are marketing discounts, not zero-egress pricing.
True zero egress means the price on the invoice is the price you pay, regardless of how much data moves out.
"EU storage" is not a regulated term. Some providers route data through US or UK nodes, cache in non-EU regions, or process metadata outside the EU. Ask specifically: where are the storage nodes physically located? Is data ever replicated outside the EU, even transiently?
For GDPR compliance, you need data that stays within the EU at rest and in transit. A provider incorporated in the EU but running on AWS us-east-1 does not qualify.
Any provider storing data on behalf of EU customers should offer a Data Processing Agreement. This is a legal requirement under GDPR Article 28, not a nice-to-have. If a provider does not publish a DPA or refuses to sign one, walk away.
Check whether the DPA covers sub-processors. If your provider uses AWS, Google, or Azure under the hood, those sub-processors need to be disclosed and covered.
Not all "S3-compatible" providers support the same API surface. If you use Veeam, Synology Hyper Backup, rclone, or Duplicati, you need a provider that supports the specific S3 operations those tools rely on: multipart uploads, ListObjectsV2, pre-signed URLs, and bucket-level access policies.
Ask for a compatibility matrix or test with your actual tools before committing.
Look for flat, published pricing per TB per month. Watch for hidden costs: API call fees (per PUT/GET request), minimum storage duration penalties, deletion fees, or "early exit" charges.
A clean pricing model looks like this: you pick a tier, you pay one number per month, you use the storage however you need to. No line items for requests, bandwidth, or retrieval.
HummingTribe S3 storage runs on dedicated hardware in Hetzner's Falkenstein data centre in Germany. Data never leaves the EU. Pricing is flat per tier — from €5.99/month for 500 GB to €376.99/month for 50 TB. Zero egress fees, zero API call charges. Every plan includes a published DPA.
The storage backend is S3-compatible and tested with Veeam, Synology Hyper Backup, rclone, Duplicati, and Proxmox Backup Server. Credentials are provisioned instantly from the client dashboard.
When evaluating EU S3 storage, the checklist is short: confirm the data stays in the EU, confirm there is a DPA, confirm egress is genuinely zero (not capped or tiered), and test with your actual backup tools before committing to a contract. Everything else is marketing.