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Comment by 8K832d7tNmiQ | Hacker News Reader

Is there any benefit using that service over Backblaze B2 that can offer you much higher price per storage?

I'm currently using B2 to store 120 GB of my personal backup and only paying 0.5 dollars per month for years and they still haven't change their price for years.

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Almost all of these Hetzner Storage boxes in my experience are basically treated as appliances; you get it provisioned, install one piece of software to utilize the disks in the way you need, and then move on with your job. In this particular case I assume the OP is actually running some webserver on the box to serve up the photos to people, so the photos obviously need to be on the server as well for that to work.

Most older photo sharing applications expect the photos to simply be discoverable through the filesystem. There are some advantages to this, for example you can leverage the filesystem indicies to get fast directory listings, organization can be done using hierarchical folders which users already know, et cetera. On the other hand, you have to manage things like this, occasionally.

For a case like photo sharing I agree something like B2 is probably much better if it can be made to work. It's not too performance sensitive and outside of the photos themselves, there's minimal persistent state necessary for the system to function. Maybe there's a photo sharing application somewhere out there that is all "cloud native" (AKA runs in a container) and is designed to work with B2/S3 in this manner...

Whether one is better than the other depends a lot on your individual use case and preferences.

Both types of storage have their strong suits. BackBlaze is great if you need an S3-compatible storage option that won't "max out" at any particular storage limit. The Hetzner option will be great if you want to be able to tinker around with a Linux instance and not pay for egress bandwidth.

If you're dealing with an amount of data that is consistently at the 100GB and don't have a large amount of egress, BackBlaze is the cheaper option. If you are storing closer to 1TB and do a fair amount of egress, the Hetzner option will be cheaper.

Backblaze is great. Their machine backups seem a little expensive, but very reliable (the whole point). B2 though, I’m the to get a bill. I don’t store much but it seems to get rounded down.

The first 10GB on B2 is free.

I’m way past that, maybe 400gb?

Edit: no, I’m just plain wrong. I am paying and it’s about 4TB.

More flexibility with storage protocols I suppose if you do need that.

Doesn't look like it, at least not on price. Don't know how they compare on features. How do you transfer data to B2? I use BorgBackup and chose this service because it has built-in support.

I use rclone to sync it with my machine that hosts Seafile application to easily manage my family's photos and personal stuffs.

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