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Comment by choppaface | Hacker News Reader

> That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company.

Stating the obvious: Backblaze wants investors to value them like a SaaS company. This blog post suggests they’re more of a logistics and product company— huge capex and depreciating assets on hand. As a customer, I like their product, but they’re no Dropbox. If they would allow personal NAS then I could see them being a software company.

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For me the Big Deal is Backblaze B2. Especially when fronted by Cloudflare -- zero traffic costs. Storage is cheap as far as cloud storage provider goes and traffic is decidedly the cheapest possible.

Even for streaming of video files? I thought you had to use Cloudflares other product for that.

We tried to use B2 for storing image and video files. First byte out is very slow (as expected). We however experienced bigger issues where if you try to upload millions of files per minute in their system, it crumbles. Huge amount of errors were thrown and their support could not help.

We decided to stick with king of storage AWS S3.

> if you try to upload millions of files per minute

may I suggest this might not be a typical usecase?

Yeah, :D But when someone hands over a storage system, temptation is high to store everything on it.

Please read https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze... especially https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze...

It's easy to buy a bunch of hard drives and connect in a data center. Managing petabytes per user for thousands of users is the hard part, and it's a software problem.

BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company... though the quality of their offering certainly lags behind Dropbox, both in terms of feature set and user experience. They're also in a very competitive industry. Storage/backup is basically a commodity nowadays.

> BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company

agreed, but I think s3 is the more realistic comparison than dropbox

100%. It’s why their margins are way leaner.

I sync my NAS to Backblaze B2 without any issues, and pricing is great.

Yeah but I don't want to pay B2 prices. I don't have a PB, but I have more than I'd really like to hang off one machine.

1TB = $5 on B2. It's pretty great pricing, and there is no reason for them to give you that for free in the backup plan, when it would obviously be at a loss. The "unlimited" plan pricing reflects the fact that very few people carry 1TB+ laptops around.

Dropbox owns more hardware than Backblaze.

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