[hobs]

When I was a customer of BB I noticed no issue with the uploads, but actually when I had a flood and my hardware was destroyed, redownloading all my information was order of magnitudes slower.

I tried from multiple physical locations but I could not increase my downloads past 1-2mbps, and for TB of data, that seemed like it was throttled by BB considering I was easily uploading 20mbps.

I contacted BB support and they ignored me, so I switched to a competing services and have had no issues ever since.

This really made me sad because BB's blog is amazing and their tech is really cool, but when you see people saying "its throttled" its because of real experiences out there, and not just ones limited to an ISP issue.

[brianwski]

Brian from Backblaze here. I wonder if that was during the incredibly annoying "Comcast goes to war with Netflix" era that Backblaze got caught up in. That was Nov 2013 through Feb 2014, you can read a little about it here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/obama-backs-net-neutrality/ (scroll down for our graphs showing our customers getting throttled). That seriously sucked for Backblaze.

But either way, we added threading to the bzdownloader (our custom application to download large restores) and if you tried it today crank it up to 10 threads and I swear you'll be happy with the download performance.

[hobs]

Brian, thank you for responding, I appreciate your clarity and honesty.

My issue did occur during that period, and I am impressed you can call that out from memory, it must have been a frustrating time for BB.

If that alone was the problem, you would have just 100% won back a customer, but the thing that irked me the most was the customer support response.

I know you do not work for your helpdesk, but their response was more the reason I left, their apparent lack of concern was what turned one of any service provider malfunctions into a dissatisfied customer looking for a competitor.

[brianwski]

I can laugh about that period now, but yeah, it was a bad few months. We bled out good customers like yourself and we felt helpless. My basic faith in the internet was shaken up - I always thought I would send packets and they would be delivered quickly, and here are these HUGE players in the space messing with each other throttling each other and changing routing to get around throttling (and hurting Backblaze as collateral damage).

> do not work for your helpdesk

It's unfortunate when a customer gets a bad experience. The helpdesk guys are faced with this monumental task of responding to tons and tons of basic questions by Mom & Pop customers that are not computer professionals. Then mixed in are competent programmers and IT guys that know what the heck they are talking about. The helpdesk guys sometimes get it wrong who they are dealing with and it infuriates the competent computer users.

I think we should issue "professional computer user" cards where you can get a different level of support from all these companies. If you were helpful on forums you could earn points for your card, but if you ask helpdesk too many dumb questions your card could be revoked and you would go back to the first tier support. :-)

[voltagex_]

Is there anywhere I can traceroute to / test upload & download speed? I'm on a 10/1 connection, and I can only use about .5 of that 1 before my connection is completely tanked. (Thanks, Australian Governments). If I could do a trickle upload and write some good scheduling, I'm definitely moving to BB2 - from Glacier.