Basin Is Live: S3-Compatible Object Storage with Free Egress

Today we are launching Basin on alawadi.cloud: S3-compatible buckets you create from your dashboard in about a minute, served in-region from damm-1 at https://basin.alawadi.cloud. Storage costs $0.04 per GB-month, egress is free, and request operations are included. You pay from the same balance and vouchers you already use for everything else, so there is still no credit card anywhere in the journey.

Why object storage#

A container's disk is the wrong home for anything that should outlive a deployment. User uploads, generated media, exports, and backups all need storage that any of your services can reach, that survives restarts and redeploys, and that keeps growing without resizing an app.

That is what object storage is for, and the S3 API is its common language. Every serious SDK, framework, and tool already speaks it: the aws CLI, rclone, boto3, the AWS SDKs for JavaScript, Go, PHP, and the rest. Point them at our endpoint and they work.

What you get#

• An S3-compatible endpoint at https://basin.alawadi.cloud, region damm-1, using path-style requests (every SDK supports this with a single flag, shown below).
• Buckets in about a minute, created from the dashboard like any other service.
• Private by default. Every bucket starts closed to the world.
• Per-bucket scoped credentials. Each bucket gets its own access key and secret, shown once at creation. A leaked key exposes one bucket, never your account.
• Replicated storage. Objects are stored across independent servers in-region, so the loss of a single machine does not touch your data.
• Simple pricing. $0.04 per GB-month. Free egress. Request operations included. That is the whole rate card, and you can compute your bill in your head.
• Your existing balance. Vouchers and credit work here exactly as they do for containers and databases.

The line item we removed: egress#

Most clouds price storage low and then charge for every gigabyte your users download. The bill arrives after your traffic does, which is exactly when you can least change course.

We are doing the opposite. Serving your data out of alawadi.cloud is free, whether that is a restore of last night's backup or a busy month of user downloads. You pay for what you store, not for the traffic your success generates. And because the storage lives in-region, your users across the Levant get their bytes from nearby, not from a data center on another continent.

A first taste#

Create a bucket from the dashboard, copy the credentials it shows you (they appear only once), and you are ready:

aws configure set aws_access_key_id EXAMPLE_ACCESS_KEY_ID
aws configure set aws_secret_access_key EXAMPLE_SECRET_KEY
 
# Upload a file to your bucket (use the bucket name from your dashboard)
aws s3 cp ./report.pdf s3://YOUR_BUCKET/reports/report.pdf \
  --endpoint-url https://basin.alawadi.cloud
 
# List what's inside
aws s3 ls s3://YOUR_BUCKET/reports/ --endpoint-url https://basin.alawadi.cloud

If you use an SDK instead of the CLI, enable path-style addressing. In the JavaScript SDK that is one flag:

import { S3Client } from "@aws-sdk/client-s3";
 
const s3 = new S3Client({
  region: "damm-1",
  endpoint: "https://basin.alawadi.cloud",
  forcePathStyle: true,
});

The full walkthrough, including rclone and other SDKs, is in the storage quickstart.

Honest launch limits#

We keep the caveats public, as always:

• Capacity is booked per bucket. You choose a size when you create the bucket, and billing at launch is on that booked size. Booked capacity is capacity we actually guarantee.
• Buckets are private only. There is no public-bucket mode yet, so serving a website directly from a bucket is not offered at launch. Your app reads from the bucket with its credentials and serves users itself.

Start now#

• Read the storage quickstart in the docs.
• Estimate your cost with the pricing calculator.
• Open the portal at app.alawadi.cloud and create your first bucket.

For a practical follow-up, read our new tutorial on nightly backups to your own bucket with rclone. Questions? Open a support ticket in the portal, or email [email protected].