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Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

How does their s3 replacement fare against backblaze b2?

(Author of Hashbackup)

  B2 pricing is 0.5 cents/GB/mo, R2 is 1.5 cents/GB/mo.
  B2 egress is 1 cents/GB/mo with 1GB/day free, R2 is free.

If your cloud storage is for backups, B2 is likely to be less expensive because backups are rarely downloaded and their 1GB/day of free egress is enough to do backup maintenance to optimize storage.

Cloudflare's CDN can proxy a B2 bucket to get free egress and maybe faster downloads (haven't needed it myself):

https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using...

I'm a big fan of B2 because:

  - they have low pricing
  - they have simple pricing
  - they don't use gimmicks: minimum storage time, minimum file size, minimum payment per month, etc.

HashBackup was one of the first B2 integrations and I've never had problems with it.

Do remember that Cloudlfare's CDN is not meant to serve non-webpage content. They outline it in their ToS; section 2.8 here: https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/

It is unlikely that this same restriction would apply to R2.

Their CEO was on here the other day and said it doesn't apply to R2 or Workers, and that they needed to update their TOS:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683255

Thank you. I was going to explore usage if R2 or B2 for elasticsearch "cold-index" storage. R2 seems more ideal for better egress.

B2 is really good for backups, other providers like scaleway has similar price if not cheaper.

I just checked, and Scaleway's object store pricing is 0.01 euros/GB/mo (0.012 cents/GB/mo) vs Backblaze at 0.005 cents/GB/mo, so Scaleway is 2.4x more expensive at today's exchange rate: 0.012/0.005 = 2.40

They do have C14 Glacier-like object storage for less, but it also has a unique workflow where data is uploaded to a temporary area, archived 7 days later, has a unique archive id that has to be kept and then used to restore archives back into the temporary area.

I tried to signup for Scaleway's free 75GB/mo account just now, to run some performance tests with HashBackup (I'm the author), but they won't allow creating a bucket until credit card details are entered.

By contrast, Backblaze lets you create a new account w/o credit card info, within the free 10GB limit. You only need a credit card to go past 10GB. They have a big button to click to run free proof-of-concept tests that exceed 10GB.

That's why I'm a B2 fan.

The problem with B2 is the API request costs can easily bring it over 1.5 cents per GB per month. If R2 can keep to free egress and free (or at least the cheapest) API requests, it will blow all other competitors out of the water. The only provider who provides free S3 compatible with free egress and free API calls is Linode at 2 cents per GB per month. The downside with Linode is your S3 is limited to one region. For now though they are an amazing choice because I can have cheap S3 with unlimited egress in the same region as my managed k8s, also with unlimited egress. The main thing that stresses me out with Linode is having to manage my own SQL database...

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