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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

> I didn't read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x.

Can't be more than 2.5 because Backblaze B2 already gives you $5/TB/Mo.

Backblaze is operating at their own economy of scale with dedicated deals with suppliers, custom bare bones hardware, optimized processes, etc. It's always more expensive starting out as a little company for raw hardware and processes until you're big enough and mature enough to get the deals and processes in place.

That is also not the only service that Backblaze offers and wasn't their first. It could be that B2 is simply a way for them to offset their cost for extra capacity and are running it effectively near-cost for them.

If all their other customers on the $5/month unlimited backup plan store less than 1TB, but since it’s really aggressive about backing up everything (no, please don’t back up my steam games) on your computer I think they go over that.

Don't forget the vast amount of notebooks with SSDs that have less than 1TB storage to begin with.

Here's the histogram from their AMA: https://i.imgur.com/iVEuwUT.jpg

About a third of the users are under 100GB.

Another third is under 500GB.

13% from 500GB to 1TB.

9% from 1TB to 2TB.

8% from 2TB to 5TB.

5% above that.

And they cited raw costs of over $3.50 per TB. But of course that's with real datacenters and non-shoddy equipment.

Backblaze deduplicates data right? So it doesn’t really cost them anything to back up your steam games.

they'd probably charge you the same anyway, even if THEY get it at basically free ;)

They can't deduplicate properly encrypted data, that will have to happen client-side. So while they can deduplicate your data (if you have a copy of a picture in multiple places or maybe even a game installed on multiple machines), it won't work across users.

In that case I’d also expect them to skip uploading the data, but everything is uploaded.

> Can't be more than 2.5 because Backblaze B2 already gives you $5/TB/Mo.

Well it can be, if they have a lot of inefficiencies. Backblaze could have more experienced engineers who overcame these. I assure you, I can accidentally design a very expensive storage system as I’m not that smart ;)

Who are you?

Scaleway C14 [1] gives the $2/TB/month that the title promises. Now, providing Sia storage space may be more expensive because you have to calculate costs for proof-of-storage (and may not be able to pull off the "cold storage" model, which may also only work in conjunction with a higher-priced low-latency offering), plus potentially more replication than a centralized service uses, but it does indicate that it's probably not completely unrealistic.

[1] https://www.scaleway.com/en/c14-cold-storage/

Backblaze doesn't give you a random read/write like DropBox, and wanting your disk drive back takes some time...

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