CloudArchive

CloudArchive is a self-hosted backup and archival platform built to be run as a business. It stores customer data in Amazon S3 Glacier, the storage class range purpose-built for archives, and wraps it in the accounts, plans, gateways and dashboards needed to sell archival storage as a service. Storage sits in your own AWS account.

The reason to build on Glacier rather than ordinary object storage is the pair of numbers underneath it. All S3 Glacier classes are designed for 99.999999999% durability — eleven nines — with virtually unlimited scalability, at archive prices rather than hot-storage prices. The listing quotes roughly $3.60 per TB for the Glacier classes and $0.99 per TB for S3 Glacier Deep Archive, the cheapest storage in the cloud, in exchange for retrieval within 12 hours. Those are AWS's rates rather than the platform's, so check AWS's current pricing before you build a plan on them.

Two storage tiers, three retrieval speeds

• S3 Glacier — for archives that might be needed back in a hurry.
• S3 Glacier Deep Archive — for the material that legally has to exist and realistically will never be read: compliance archives, digital media preservation, anything with a retention schedule measured in years.
• Expedited retrieval — 1 to 2 minutes, on the Glacier tier.
• Standard retrieval — 3 to 5 hours, on both tiers.
• Bulk retrieval — 5 to 12 hours, on both tiers, and free. Which means restoring a large archive slowly costs an operator nothing in retrieval fees, and that is a plan feature worth selling.

Getting large data in

• Native S3 multipart uploading — built in, so genuinely large files upload in parts rather than dying at a PHP limit.
• Chunk size control — tune the upload part size to the connections your customers actually have.
• Per-role archive size limits — set size ceilings separately for free users and for paying subscribers, which is how the free tier stays affordable.
• Virtually unlimited space — the ceiling is your AWS account, not the platform.

Compliance standards Glacier supports

The Glacier storage classes support a set of security standards and compliance certifications that matter in regulated archiving: SEC Rule 17a-4, PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, EU GDPR and FISMA. Those are properties of the AWS service the data sits in; what an operator has to do to satisfy an auditor is separate work.

The business layer

• Plans — monthly and yearly subscriptions, created from the admin panel. Recurring rather than prepaid, which suits storage: archival revenue and archival cost both accrue per month.
• 5 payment gateways — PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay and Paystack online, plus offline bank transfer, all four of them handling both monthly and yearly terms. Every SaaS feature and every gateway is covered by the Regular License.
• Affiliate and referral system — referrals, earnings and payouts, included rather than bolted on.
• Finance dashboard — monthly and yearly income against estimated spend on S3 Glacier, the pair of figures that tells you whether a plan is priced above cost. On a storage business that gap is the entire margin, since cost accrues every month the data stays.
• Admin panel — users, plans, archives and settings in one place.

Requirements worth knowing

Built on PHP 8.1 and Laravel 9 — the newest stack of the Cloud line — with comprehensive documentation and six months of included support. A valid AWS account is required, storage and retrieval are billed by AWS at its own published rates, and the interface is fully responsive but is a web application rather than a native mobile app.

Ideal for

• Managed service providers adding offsite backup and long-term retention to what they already sell.
• Firms under retention obligations — legal, financial, medical — that need archives kept for years and rarely read.
• Media and production companies preserving finished projects and raw footage off working storage.
• Agencies keeping completed client work without paying hot-storage rates for it.
• Founders launching a paid cloud archival service with plans, gateways and affiliates already built.
• Anyone whose current backup story is an external drive on a shelf.