What is the cheapest cloud non-BLOB storage?

Question

I have an iPhone app that must use external cloud db to sync data between users. Data is structured, so BLOB storage will not do. So far the only alternatives that i see are

• Amazon SimpleDB
• MS Azure Storage (Tables). I didnt get if i could use just Storage and no Azure instances.

Are there any other similar providers?

Answer 1

A quick search brought up this article here about ThruDB.

Answer 2

You can absolutely use Azure Storage (which includes tables, blobs, and queues) with no compute instances. Storage costs $0.15 / GB, and you'll pay for bandwidth usage ($0.10 / GB inbound, $0.15 / GB outbound). And you'll pay $0.01 / 10,000 storage transactions.

Regarding Azure tables specifically, you can have as many tables as you'd like within your storage account. While tables are schema-less, I typically advise sticking with a single entity type per table (of course, there are always exceptions to every rule...).

You can find more pricing info here.

For a free month of Azure, including storage, head on over to AzurePassUSA.