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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

I have used B2 for a couple of months. From Europe it is way too slow. They only have like 2 DC, which are both on the west coast I believe.

As I am using this for backups only, I went back to Google Drive where I can max out my Gbit upload.

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If you are connecting from Europe, maybe you could consider exoscale.com 's S3 storage offering?

It's 100% european (with Swiss and German regions), and priced pretty aggressively. https://www.exoscale.com/object-storage/

Disclaimer: I now work for exoscale, but was a happy user before that.

Cool, you guys should send out mailings to your customers when new offerings come online. I asked about s3 at the end of last year and was told it is currently unavailable for new customers. I haven't thought to check if it was available until now and may have gone to a more expensive competitor.

Thanks for this - contacted now. If you hear about any discounts for small startups, please let me know :)

I can max out the upload of my residential internet connection (about 1 megabyte/sec) and that's enough for me.

I use use it to back up my Nas where all my other computers are backed up. I set it up with duplicacy-cli, rate limited the upload to 700KByte/sec (internet stay usable that way) and the script that launches duplicacy check that it is not already running.

Since I never upload more than 60Gb per day on average to my Nas I don't have any issues

Yes, I think I maxed out at 30 MB/s.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> From Europe it is way too slow.

We are opening a European datacenter in 2018, so stay tuned!

For now, we recommend you use multiple threads and you should be able to saturate any network connection, including yours in Europe. However, we do realize not all programmers or applications are capable of using threads and it would be more convenient to have lower latencies, thus the European datacenter in 2018. :-)

I tried it from the UK a couple of years ago, and had the same experience. I have ~1TB of data to backup, and it was going to take months to upload vs a few days for Azure or AWS hosted storage.

Did you try enabling multi-threaded support? I was able to upload ~12 TB using 12-16 threads in a few months (and I'm based in EU as well).

It was a while ago, but I seem to recall I had enabled it. Things might have changed since then, so I guess I'll give it another go at some point.

> From Europe it is way too slow.

That's why we're still using AWS S3 currently in spite of the price, and consider moving to Digital Ocean's Spaces: B2 location is a non-starter.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> B2 location is a non-starter.

We are opening a European datacenter in 2018, so stay tuned!

Interesting! Hopefully it's within the EU and not in the UK (some of our customers are picky for legal reasons)

It'd be interesting to find out if it's acceptably fast when proxying via a cloud provider.

Here is the CTO of Backblaze addressing speed questions earlier today: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/8u40xa/i_wrote_a_li...

Maybe I misunderstand his point, but isn't transferring data from Australia to the US or reverse always going to be slower due to the speed of light? What he's said doesn't negate the fact that he's only got one POP.

I'm not sure how many POPs they have so I do agree with that. I'm not shilling for B2 and have no affiliation with them. I've had good performance them but am US based.

My individual connections to B2 are slow (200-500 KB/s) coming from Europe but that's why the multi-threaded option makes B2 very usable.

Speed of light affects latency, not throughput. TCP works bad with large delays, that's why it's recommended to use several TCP connections to saturate the link.

Yeah, I can never remember how TCP window size + latency affects transfer speed but you're right.

Doesn't that destroy the value of B2 in that you're going to pay Amazon or whoever's egress costs?

Not if you're only egressing to B2 once to save and then egressing many times from B2 to serve.

In that case, consider packet, egress to B2 is free. They claim a good network, but I didn't test (yet).

You use the SJC1 option in packet.net to get the free ingress/egress. It's slowish single threaded but 100-200 megabit is easy with 4 threads.

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