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by thrtythreeforty 1470 days ago
To be clear, I have no special insight into underlying S3 costs. Only the perspective of a customer.

My opinion is that Backblaze has done an awesome job of driving their storage costs down, scaling that up, and then reflecting that thriftiness in their pricing. Their technical communication (e.g. hard drive reliability reports, software engineering blogs) makes me believe in their competence. So when Backblaze sets a price, I expect that's pretty close to the minimum sustainable price, because they've spent a lot of effort on that.

B2 currently charges $5/TB/mo with lots of options for bandwidth that's too cheap to meter. This strikes me as pretty fair overall.
1 comments
Dylan16807 1470 days ago
B2 is definitely a lower tier of storage and I don't begrudge amazon wanting $23 for their top tier.

But the bandwidth is a huge issue.

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thrtythreeforty 1469 days ago
In what sense? The durability is 11 9s either way [1]. If you value all the different AWS regions, then it's true that B2 can't match that. I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though.

[1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Re...

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Dylan16807 1469 days ago
The data is only stored in one data center, and the 99.9 and 99.99 percentile latency on requests is not good and can cause issues depending on use case.

And if durability is your main concern you'd be on a cheaper S3 plan anyway.

> I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though.

Sure. S3 and B2 have different strengths, and B2 is better for many uses. But looking at the full stack and the performance at each layer suggests to me that S3 charges a reasonable/fair price for storage. And that's what the question was about.

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