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Comment by Youden | Hacker News Reader

Interesting pricing considering Backblaze is another Bandwidth Alliance member and they only charge $0.005/GBmonth (vs. $0.015/GBmonth). B2 + CloudFlare gives you a similar deal at a third the cost.

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Yes but you can only use B2 via CloudFlare for web pages. Using it as a data storage platform isn't allowed. Unless of course you're willing to pay handsomely via an enterprise contract, but then the pricing changes.

Use of the Services for serving video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content is prohibited, unless purchased separately as part of a Paid Service or expressly allowed under our Supplemental Terms for a specific Service. [1]

[1] 2.8 Limitation on Serving Non-HTML Content https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

That limitation doesn’t apply to the R2 service or Workers generally. We’ll update and clarify our ToS. Thanks for flagging!

Continue to be impressed to have the CEO replying to comments on HN, as with Stripe ... that's a good signal :)

But to clarify it _does_ apply to B2?

You may use Cloudflare Pages and Workers (whether in conjunction with a storage offering such as Cloudflare Workers KV and Durable Objects or not) to serve HTML content as well as non-HTML content (e.g., image files, audio files) other than video files.

See: https://www.cloudflare.com/supplemental-terms/ § Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers®

The said limitation should apply however to their tranditional service with orange on whether it is B2 or not. I am not sure if being a Bandwidth Alliance partner makes a difference.

So the gray area comes from an exception being granted from R2 not specified in that linked page. R2, like B2 is part of Cloudflare's bandwidth alliance, so is the unwritten exception for R2 or for the bandwidth alliance?

I recently started keeping about 30TB of ElasticSearch and Postgres backups in Backblaze B2. The price is great, but getting data in is not particularly easy as the Backblaze S3 API seems to fail a high proportion of requests when under load.

If R2 can be approximately as reliable on ingest as AWS/GCS/Azure is, but without the egress fees of the other major providers, then $0.015/GB-month seems like a pretty good deal.

I’ve had a great experience with Wasabi + BunnyCDN. Might be worth kicking the tires, as it’s a really inexpensive combo.

B2 really is an exercise in making sure your code is robust with respect to external APIs but I'll be damned if it isn't cheap. We ended up building a whole queueing system for it because ad-hoc retry logic stopped being good enough.

I'm excited because while B2 + Cloudflare is great, the speed+latency isn't the greatest for some applications. So there's definitely a place for R2 here to compete more with AWS S3 than B2.

I'm a fan of B2 as well, but for some use-cases they seriously need to up their game. They only have three datacenters (CA, AZ, and Amsterdam), they still don't have a public status page, their admin UI is lacking lots of features (like proper invoices and different 2FA options), their permission system is very basic and inflexible, and they are not integrating compute with storage like AWS already does and Cloudflare will eventually be able to. However they are impossible to beat on cost, and for me their latency has recently improved significantly and has become much more stable, so I'm not going to move anytime soon.

What kind of speed difference are you seeing with B2 vs S3?

Latency (time to first byte) in serving infrequently accessed images was a big problem with me and B2. The cost was low enough that I've stuck with it though and coded on the front end of the site to use placeholder images until the real media can be retrieved.

Very much depends on what you're utilizing Backblaze for. It's unusable for volume image hosting for example. It has severe performance problems with small files, as does much of the object storage field (including DigitalOcean, they directly warn customers not to bother using their object storage for small files if performance is a concern). The CDN doesn't help much, Backblaze chokes if you try to shovel a large number of small files at it (their infrastructure was not designed for that and they admit it in their docs), and or attempt to pull a lot of small files out of it. AWS is pretty great when it comes to that by contrast, and with the price to go with it. I'm looking forward to finding out what R2 can do.

This is true - most of the object storage providers are really bad at serving data fast, they more focused on a cold storage. Tebi.io works really fast for small files, plus it is a geo-distributed object storage meaning that data is physically stored in different locations around the world, greatly reducing latency.

Backblaze, DO Spaces simply were not designed for this in the first place.

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