I’ve just received this E-Mail from Backblaze, announcing a slight increase in storage cost.
In exchange, they offer a free download budget of three times the stored capacity.
Storage Price Increase: Effective October 3, 2023, we are increasing the monthly pay-as-you-go storage rate from $5/TB to $6/TB. The price of B2 Reserve will not change.
Free Egress: Also effective October 3, we’re making egress free (i.e. free download of data) for all B2 Cloud Storage customers—both pay-as-you-go and B2 Reserve—up to three times the amount of data you store with us, with any additional egress priced at just $0.01/GB. Because supporting an open cloud environment is central to our mission, expanding free egress to all customers so they can move data when and where they prefer is a key next
Product Upgrades: From Object Lock for ransomware protection, to Cloud Replication for redundancy, to more data centers to support data location needs, Backblaze has consistently improved B2 Cloud Storage. Stay tuned for more this fall, when we’ll announce upload performance upgrades, expanded integrations, and more partnerships.
Free egress is fine and all, but as someone who uses cloud storage as a last resort, I’d want to pay less for storing that data, regardless of what it costs to get it back.
A 20% increase is a little bonkers. Do they give any reasons for this substantial increase? Computer storage prices have not gone up, from what I can see (they’ve gone way down from two years ago).
Back blaze is one of the OG “cheap cloud” storage providers.
They buy cheap stuff and develop cheap storage networks to charge cheap prices and stay in business. They publish entire papers on running cheap storage if you’re interested. It’s actually pretty interesting stuff.
They raised prices 20% (or $1). Hardware costs **may have gone down that much, but I’m willing to bet their energy and rent prices haven’t. They’re subject to services inflation just as much as anybody else.
Frozen pizza prices in my area have increased more in the last year than their services.
They use a company called 45Drives to build their infrastructure. Here you can learn more link
I used to use Backblaze before getting a NAS, and they were always very reasonably priced.
20% just sounds pretty harsh all at once. It’s not like someone can just migrate many TB of data to a different service overnight. And it’s $1 x #TB x every month. It adds up quick, unfortunately.
I’m still looking for a “cheap” cloud storage once my idrive e2 promo period ends. At some point, it’s just going to be more affordable to set up another nas somewhere, especially with Synology’s new full system backup with block-level incremental backup.
They do more than just tie hard drives together with a string. They build custom server hardware, maintain data center infrastructure including cooling and networking, pay their employees (the biggest cost), and all the overhead of running a business.
20% increase in one go is rather normal. Business tend to do one big price increase instead of constant small ones because our brains don’t see them billing efficiently relative to their costs, they see only a bunch of tiny price increases.
Yes and now imagine that tomorrow your house flood , now you have to download all your data from Backblaze you can be sure that it will be no extra charges for downloading that data.
If my only option to recover all my data was to restore my cloud backup (which it isn’t), I would not want to download TB after TB of data. I’d go with Backblaze’s “restore by mail” option and just pay for $189. Any data that’s important can’t wait weeks to restore anyway.