Hacker News Reader

Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

Digital Ocean has spaces with unlimited uploads, 250gB + (0.02/gb), 1TB of outbound transfer all at $5/mo.

That seems way cheaper than this.

For backups and large, long term storage, AWS has Glacier, that's really really cheap.

I'm a big fan of Digital Ocean and run a bunch of droplets. B2 is way cheaper than Spaces for storage (1/4 the price). I tried using Spaces anyway, because I wanted something with faster throughput for streaming video, but Spaces was even slower than B2, even within the same Digital Ocean datacenter. All these S3 clone storage systems are clearly throttled, and there seems to be at least soft collusion to keep the bandwidth about the same between them, and just enough to prevent video streaming. I'll go sit in the corner and adjust my tinfoil hat now.

$0.02/gb compared to $0.005 with b2. So not really in the same ballpark as far as price.

That's just the storage cost per GB, if you have any kind of serious throughput, then bandwith costs make it more expensive.

Aren't they in that free bandwidth alliance with Cloudflare?

Yes, it looks like Backblaze is part of that free bandwidth alliance. [1]

Thank you, I was not aware of this policy.

[1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/

Yea, that changes things, that's a pretty good deal then.

Especially because Cloudflare's pricing is "smoother" and detached from any one service.

Yev from Backblaze here -> yes we are!

Thank you for being our Yev!

Wait until you see how much it costs to retrieve your entire backup from Glacier.

I guess it depends on how likely you are to need to do that. Looking at b2 vs glacier deep it seems as long as you don't need the data more than every 2y that glacier still works out cheaper even with the high bandwidth costs.

But glacier also has minimum storage duration. With S3, you'll need to use a tiered system unless you want to store all backups for several months (often that's only the case for weekly or monthly backups).

In the end, S3 can be cheaper but you have to make a lot of assumptions beforehand. Backblaze is cheap enough to just throw everything in there and work with their lifecycle rules. You don't need to make assumptions about download volumes or storage duration beforehand (esp if you can retrieve via cloudflare).

Spaces was not fully compatible with S3 at one point. It was nearly impossible to download your entire bucket when it was huge. Rclone was able to, but it was horribly slow. AWS CLI would only grab up to 1000 items. It seems like they did finally fix that though.

I’m actually a huge fan of Bunny now. The CDN piece is about as cheap as it gets (for any utility based service), it’s optimizer and other things work well, and it works seamlessly with their storage system too. Which is super cheap itself, allows you to control how much it’s replicated (and where) - just waiting for them to deliver S3 compatibility so all the existing tools that exist work, or some other type of CLI tool.

Linode has the same and allows using bandwidth pooled across all instances

I wonder if this still applies about performance comparison.

https://github.com/gilbertchen/cloud-storage-comparison

Backblaze downloads are $.01/GB, not $.02/GB as stated there. And via Cloudflare they're free. That makes a big difference vs. AWS where you have no chance to get that data to another provider for free (unless you have a very special deal with them).

If you ever need those backups, your company will fail from the receipt to receive them.

For Digital Ocean, please look that their pricing is higher in both bandwidth & storage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com