[atYevP]

Yev from Backblaze here -> It's true, we just have the one. Backblaze was bootstrapped, so we cannot over-expand and maintain profitability, which allows us to stay in business. We're pretty up-front about having the one datacenter. We'd LOVE to add more in the future, but truthfully, it would at least double our costs, and we'd need to raise prices. We're thinking of ways of avoiding that while maintaining our current business-model. If you are looking for something more geo-redundant, take a look at services like Amazon S3, they are great, but the downside there is they charge per GB to make up for the extra costs, so depending on the amount of data, it can get pricey. Either way, we recommend a 3-2-1 backup policy (3 copies of your data, 2 onsite but on different mediums and 1 offsite) as a good start to a backup strat. We're just one solution of many, though, we like to think we're the easiest one!

[kbenson]

How about an add-on cost/service that tags your data as needing datacenter redundancy, and only replicating that to a new datacenter. It has the benefit of not requiring as much up-front investment, as it's used it pays for itself, and you have a bunch of current customers you can upsell to. The architecture to segregate redundant from non-redundant backup customers could be a pain, but as long as you have tools to migrate data between systems (I imagine you do), then it could just be running two separate backblaze clusters in the first datacenter, one which supports redundancy and one which doesn't, and then just migrate customer data between the clusters as the add/drop the redundancy service. That saves you from having to cherry-pick specific files/customers from the the cluster to duplicate in the other datacenter, you just make sure one cluster is always redundant.

[atYevP]

We're definitely looking at options like this, but the engineering work that it would take to implement solutions like that are not insignificant, and a lot of our engineering muscle has been working to roll out the Vaults over the past year and change! It could certainly be another revenue stream for us, but building out a new datacenter is expensive, especially if you don't buy/guarantee build-out ahead of time, so we'd have to forecast how many people would want that service to prepare accordingly, again not insignificant stuff, but is definitely possible in the future!

[kbenson]

The nice thing about using separate clusters is that you can build them out in chunks. Build X new capacity in your main datacenter as a new cluster, and X new capacity in a different datacenter, and replicate. Need more redundant capacity? Build Y new capacity in your main datacenter, and Y new capacity in a different datacenter, not even necessarily the same backup datacenter as before. You end up with one main non-redundant cluster, and a bunch of smaller redundant clusters spread over one or more additional datacenters.

If you're really lucky, you siphon off customers from the non-redundant service for this at the same or faster rate as they are signing up for the non-redundant service, allowing you to not have to build that out much for a short while.

[mey]

As an existing customer, I'd pay for geo-site redundancy at double the current pricing.