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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

Pricing can be funny!

    Total Data Stored    Monthly Downloads    Cost
    1TB                  1000TB               $119,712/yr
    1000TB               1000TB               $72,000/yr

What is the cheapest TDS for a given 1000TB monthly downloads?

Seems to be:

    334TB                1000TB               $24,048/yr

So there are situations where uploading dummy files that pad with zeros will reduce your bill.

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Edit: The 334 now seems obvious when you consider:

* Egress is $10/TB

* Store is $6/TB

Free Egress is 3x monthly data store. So egress costs $6/TB when you get it 'free' vs $10/TB, so you need it all free to get the cheapest egress, which means you need 1/3 storage that is egress. Any higher and your wasting money on storage!

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From the very top, this is great analysis. I wonder if they are willing to strike a deal if you need relatively high egress, but very low storage. Also, I do expect that Backblaze's lifetime egress costs per drive far exceed the TCO for the drive (minus egress). Zero trolling: It would great to see some commentary directly from Backblaze on this matter -- for example, explain that egress is very expensive.

EDIT

Above, you wrote that egress is 10 USD / TB. What are egress costs for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft?

Full disclosure - I am Chief Technical Evangelist at Backblaze.

Pulling the egress costs from the hyperscalers' storage pricing pages:

* Amazon S3 ranges from $50-$90/TB depending on monthly volume.

* Google Cloud Storage ranges from $80-$230/TB depending on monthly volume and where you're transferring data to/from.

* Azure Blob Storage ranges from $40-$181/TB (with the First 100GB/month free) depending on monthly volume and whether you route data via the Microsoft Premium Global Network.

Cloudflare published a blog post a couple of years ago explaining just how much money AWS makes on egress - customers are paying up to 80x Amazon's costs: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress

> I wonder if they are willing to strike a deal if you need relatively high egress, but very low storage.

It depends on what "very low" means. We have a capacity-based pricing option, Backblaze B2 Reserve, starting at 20 TB, that includes all egress and transaction fees.

Pat Patterson: Hat tip! Thank you for the excellent follow-up. In short, your prices of 10 USD / TB are a steal according to your data. Keep up the great work. I'm not yet a customer, but I will be very soon.

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