Hi Jojo.
To be honest, I have discovered that using Glacier DIRECTLY for Plesk backup storage is not ideal.
Have you looked at Wasabi? (search wasabi s3). Wasabi uses the same API as S3 and is pretty much interchangeable. They charge $5.99 per TB which is much less than S3 Standard (note, however, that there is a $5.99 minimum charge per month for new customers and a 90 day minimum retention policy). Using their own figures, if you store data on Wasabi for more than 23 days, it will be cheaper than S3, but if you store it for less than 23 days, S3 is cheaper. For backups, I would imagine you would be keeping data for between 30 to 90 days. Check out their FAQs for more details.
This 90 day minimum retention policy can be a problem (same as Glacier of course) if you are doing short term backups. For example, if you are backing up a WordPress site once every month and only want to keep one copy, then the 90 day retention policy will be a problem in that you will effectively be forced to keep the data for 90 days rather than one month, and your costs triple compared to what you really wanted. Again the same applies to Glacier, which has a 90 day (or is it 60?) minimum retention policy.
I have not yet checked to see if the Plesk cloud storage extension supports wasabi or not. It should - there is no reason for it not to - and I may have a look today.
Other companies also offer S3-compatible storage which may be cheaper. The data centre we use has done so, for example, which I found surprising. I may give it a go soon. I believe DigitalOcean's Spaces is also S3 compatible, so that's another option.
But if you want to stick to S3, then you have a couple of options:
1) As Igor mentioned, you can create a Glacier bucket and backup to that. True, the bucket created by the Extension is a normal bucket. Don't use the extension to create a bucket. Create the bucket in S3 yourself first, then enter the bucket name in the Extension. But I don't recommend this because restoring from Glacier is not immediate. I don't know if the Extension can handle a situation where the data is not immediately available to recover.
2) Create rules in S3 to automatically move your stored backups from the Standard bucket to Glacier after X days. This is, in fact, the best way to do it. The logic is basically you store stuff in Standard for 30 days then move to Glacier and store for 60 or 90 days or something. Recovering the data from Standard is straightforward. Immediate. High speed. Trying to recover data stored in Glacier is not immediate. I don't know if the Extension can handle it as mentioned previously. I think you may have to move the data from Glacier to Standard (via S3 console) then THEN restore.
**** IMPORTANT: I do not recommend using the Extension to create a bucket. You really should create the bucket yourself in S3. You can then set the encryption, storage type and access list properly. A minor error in the extension could potentially make a created bucket public. That would be bad. Creating the bucket manually is far more secure. AND you really should encrypt your buckets, ideally with your own key.
There is a minimum number of days that data must be stored in various types of bucket before it can be moved to another type. But there is also a minimum number of days that data must be stored in some types of bucket otherwise you get charged for it even if you delete it (especially Glacier). What I'm really saying is that sometimes something may appear cheaper but long term it is not,
MyCFAVisit or it may force you to store data for longer than you want, potentially increasing the storage cost by two or three times more than you really want or need.
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