[dwild]

> So if R2 is S3 with no egress, suddenly there is a value proposition again.

Isn't B2 from Backblaze already filling that need? I means more choice is always better for sure, but considering R2 goal seems really to be a CDN more than a backup space and it does feel like their money maker is in the CDN part, not the storage part... I feel like trusting them to store it long-term without using the CDN part is a little bit risky.

[loxias]

B2 charges for egress, $0.01/GB. More interesting to me is Wasabi, which charges ~$0.006/GB*month and no egress fees at all.

[anderspitman]

Wasabi egress is free, but they "reserve the right to limit or suspend your service"[0] if it doesn't fit the usage patterns they've designed for.

[0]: https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy

[loxias]

Huh, thanks for that. I hadn't noticed (was that always there??). So, sustained egress at rate R/sec means I have to use 2500000 * R amount of storage per month, hrm...

Possibly can't use it for one of the "ponies" I was working on, but probably still good as "ye huge media archive".

[35mm]

Wasabi doesn’t charge for egress (‘fair use’ policy applies), but they do have a 3 month minimum for data, including deleted data.

This caught me out when I was transferring 100GB files that only needed to be up for a few hours, and I ended up getting charged as if I had hosted them for 3 months.

[mwambua]

B2 doesn't charge for egress to Cloudflare. (https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/)

[loxias]

(stupid question) What does that get me? Does Cloudflare have cheap VMs I can rent with competitive prices? (including data egress fees?)

For object storage that I play with, some clients are in the cloud, with most sitting at home behind residential internet.

[jauer]

(approximately) Cloudflare provides a proxy service that you'd use to access your B2 data from home or other cloud without paying for egress.

They can do this because it costs almost nothing to move data between B2 and Cloudflare, and then from Cloudflare to almost anywhere. Moving data from B2 to most other places on the internet likely costs them more because Backblaze isn't in a position to negotiate adventagous peering agreements with ISPs.

[dan15]

Note that you can't use a free Cloudflare account just for things like images, video and other binary files, as they'll suspend the account. It must be used primarily for a website, not content hosting. If you only want to use Cloudflare for files, you need a paid account.

[chx]

Nope, eastdakota confirmed it's fine as a b2 image proxy right here on HN.

[mwambua]

In addition, you need to use Cloudflare web workers if you want any sort of access controls. (I think this is part of why it makes financial sense for Cloudflare to do this)

[loxias]

Wow! Cool! Very surprised that Cloudflare wouldn't charge an arm and a leg for such a service... considering they're moving the actual bits.

I'm poking around at the Cloudflare website, what's the name of the aforementioned service? What term should I google?

I'm ignorant of "modern Cloudflare" -- other than reading their fantastic technical blog, I've never used them in a professional capacity and don't know their product offering -- other than a cache, CDN, DDOS protection, and a Lambda.

[OJFord]

'bandwidth alliance'

As far as I recall it's not a service or even any setting you have to set up, just a sort of policy.

[dwild]

Oh yeah, I mixed ingress with egress.

Now though I don't understands the original comment... why care about egress for backup storage? I means as long as it's not absurd (and I agree that AWS egress price is absurd, though the original comment wasn't complaining of that...), you usually don't expect to have to retrieve it and if required, you are ready to pay much more for it as it will be worth it.

[znpy]

Frankly, backblaze looks like an over-specialized player whereas clouflare is already used for a lot of stuff.

Eg: my employer already has stuff on clouflare, using their services is just as easy as pulling their terraform provider. OTOH, for backblaze, I'd have to go through the whole evaluation process, security and legal compliance etc etc...

[dx034]

Backblaze has only two locations and they cannot be used with the same account. Your data is (within one account) always just in California oder Amsterdam. For many needs, having multiple PoPs is crucial.

[atYevP]

Yev from Backblaze here -> we have more than two data center locations, but we do have two regions (US-West, which is spread out across California and Arizona and EU-Central which is in Amsterdam). Slight nuance, but very different!

[dx034]

You're right, but for me as a customer it doesn't matter. I can choose from two geographical locations and cannot use both at once with one account. So there's no option to get data close to my users.

[mcdevilkiller]

You can front it with Cloudflare's CDN for free.

[dx034]

You're not allowed to use Cloudflare to just serve files, at least not in free/cheap tiers.