DreamHost, the Web hosting and cloud computing company, is diving into the cloud-based object storage industry with its new DreamObjects service, which is built upon the open source Ceph file system originally developed by - who else? - DreamHost.
In addition to the Ceph file system, DreamObjects was built on a variety of other open source tools, including the Ubuntu Linux 12.4 OS distribution from Canonical and the open source Chef tool for automated provisioning and configuration. DreamHost will also be contributing code back to these open source communities.
Over 300,000 developers and entrepreneurs, across the world, currently make up DreamHost's customers, and the company has been designing much of DreamObjects's functionality based on that audience's needs thanks to initial feedback.
Among the primary features of the DreamObjects service is API compatibility with other major object storage services (including Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files). It will also come with easy-to-use interfaces and simple pricing schemes that come standard with the service.
Pricing starts at seven cents per GB per month, and can dip below five cents per GB per month for some monthly prepaid plans. To transfer data from the service it will cost seven cents per GB.
Initially, DreamObjects will be offered as a public beta, and interested users can sign up on DreamHost's website. The company also plans to offer a free two-month trial of DreamObjects with 10GB of storage and 20GB of transfer data, only charging the regular rates for overage beyond the trial-sized resources.
