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Comment by cynicalsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze B2 is worth mentioning while we are speaking of S3. I'm absolutely in love with their prices (3 times lower than of S3). (I'm not their representative).

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Backblaze's B2 is cheap - but if your'e using them in production you must include these costs:

* their weekly 2 hour maintenance window 11:30-13:30 PST (which usually has no downtime, but sometimes is a full outage in the middle of the US day)

* having to file support tickets when your error rates increase above a usable threshold (for us about once a year for the last few years)

* support which does not look into the issue, just asks tons of questions as if they do not have error logs or any visibility on their end

* false success on uploads where B2 says it successfully saved your file but it is 0 bytes on their system (ALWAYS verify the upload despite B2's success code)

* extended outages if there's a high severity CVE (ex: they shut down for 10 hours for the Log4j2 CVE)

They have the best price - but when comparing options, it is simply not a directly comparable product to more mature cloud storage services.

(edit: formatting)

With every alternative, the prevailing issue is the fact that your data is as safe as the company your data is with. But I think this can be remedied by doubly external backups.

B2 having an S3-compatible API available makes this particularly easy :)

Backblaze is like if Amazon spun AWS S3 out as its own business (and it added some backup helper tooling as a result) though, I wouldn't really worry any more about it. You could write a second copy to S3 Glacier Deep Archive (using B2 for instant access when you wanted to restore or on a new device) and still be much cheaper.

We liked B2 but not enough to pay for IPv4 addresses, insane they advertise as a multi-cloud solution but basically kill any chance at adoption when NAT gateways and IPv4 charges are everywhere. We would literally save money paying B2 bandwidth fees (high read low write) but not when being pushed through a NAT64 gateway, or paying an hourly charge just to be able to access B2.

How could they launch a cloud service like this and not have IPv6 in 2015? What other basic things did they cheap out on?

Most mayor cloud vendors are still not fully dual stack capable so it's not that surprising. And plenty of ISPs have barely started rollout, or even said they just wont.

I understand that AWS has 200 services, some of which are 20 years old, and making them all IPv6-ready would be hard and costly. Backblaze has one cloud service, and the public interface is a boring REST API over boring HTTPS.

AWS enabled dualstack S3 almost 10 years ago because object storage is pretty much the use case for IPv6.

I’m pretty sure the only other large object storage provider that is v4 only is Azure, and even then they offer a compatibility layer. Backblaze just flat out won’t work unless you pay extra to connect to them.

Honestly the only cloud provider I think you’re talking about is Azure, I don’t know of any other that are IPv4 only because it’s just cost prohibitive.

I also migrated, after asking for IPv6 for more than 3 years on reddit.

they does not seem to understand users on the b2 product. it's almost as if b2 is just a supplementary service from their backup service.

https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/ij9y9s/b2_s3_not...

they've started internal v6 rollout with external coming afterwards. no timelines though, and I've waited for years

https://old.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/1av4r3g/b2_ipv6_...

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