Backblaze B2 is cheaper than Cloudflare R2 IA. Hmmm
So is Cloudflare
If qoq and yoy revenue keeps going up, and cost of revenue stays the same or decreases (as a percentage) in the same time period, it makes sense to spend the bank account on growth. If the growth stops, that's when you start cutting expenses like R&D and operations to get the profit. Reasoning being: getting x% of a bigger revenue is better than getting x% of a smaller revenue.
I'm not so sure about Backblaze. I don't even think they're the biggest player in that space (AWS is, I would guess). I would guess most people could migrate off if Backblaze turned south.
I think the platform has a ton of potential and it already shows signs of real progress, but much like fly.io, its rough edges are incredibly rough.
Yet even though we're now dominant in our sector, we've got about 50% of the revenue from a couple of dozen very large customers, and the remaining from many hundred medium and small businesses, including many single-person shops.
A key ingredient is that we have a usage-based pricing element, so what we charge a customer monthly varies with their activity. And it's primarily this element that is tweaked between customers, so that it's affordable to both small and large, while still making it profitable for us to provide the software and support.
Having such a varied income stream has been quite good for us, and has allowed us to turn down potential lucrative customers which had unreasonable demands that could have killed us, or be flexible when certain customers really struggled under corona say, so they didn't have to go to a competitor.
I used to be quite negative to "call us" pricing, but got a new perspective after I started here. That said, I prefer transparent pricing when shopping software on my own.
Akamai doesn't look like the kind of company that wants to deal with 3,000,000 tiny accounts, and I don't think the customers will be happy with the service they get.
I guess to put it another way, do you use Cloudflare currently? If they made the free tier $5-$10/month for as many sites as you want, would you pay them or put in the effort to migrate?
I think I've got 2 sites I actually care about enough to want a CDN and DDoS protection. I would probably just pay up. I'm sure I could go somewhere else for free, but my Cloudflare setup works and I don't want to have to redo my Let's Encrypt wildcard.
As an example I investigated, to put a custom domain in front of a B2 bucket they suggest using Cloudflare and CNAME-ing a bucket subdomain (eg f000.backblazeb2.com) https://www.backblaze.com/docs/cloud-storage-deliver-public-...
Well if f000.backblazeb2.com is used for any other people's buckets too, which appears to be the case, I guess I am now able to serve other people's files from my domain? This seems terrible.
> You must configure page rules to allow Cloudflare to fetch only your Backblaze B2 bucket from your domain. ... Otherwise, someone could use your domain to fetch content from another customer's public bucket. To ensure this does not happen, Cloudflare lets you use page rules to scope requests to your bucket.
I'm sure you can layer more rules to get it exactly right but I'd not be eager to layer on complex configuration through multiple service providers when it is avoidable, unless there is some very compelling overriding reason.
I'm no expert but to try and protect my own domain, I use a transform rule to match a subdomain and append "/file/$MY_BUCKET_NAME" to each request. This should return a 404 for anybody who tries to inject their own bucket in the path. I could be wrong of course.
[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/bucket...
This looks like an awful lot of setup for "easily solved". Easily solved is what S3 does where this isn't even a problem.
curl -sL https://github.com/backblaze-b2-samples/cloudflare-b2/raw/main/README.md | head -n 1
# Cloudflare Worker for Backblaze B2
How did you figure out the conversation sniping to be earlier members?
I didn't mean earlier members as in people who joined HN in the early years, rather I meant the people who tend to react and comment within maybe the first 30 minutes after a post/comment.
I actually find the early members (as in the early 2010s and before) to be among the best. I have no idea if they are downvoters or not, but some of my favorite conversations on HN have been with these users.
As far as sourcing, definitely take with a big grain of salt because this is also purely anecdata that I've noticed from spending way too much time on HN, both repeatedly having my own comments downvoted initially while (usually) rising up over time, and observing the same phenomenon on many other people's comments.
Hetzner Storage Boxes (2.50-3 EUR per TB) is probably the sweet spot. B2 if you need an object storage API.
You also only get a very locked down shell.
"The snapshot contents are distributed over multiple internal servers and data is stored in a way that allows up to two separate disks to fail without impacting data integrity. This means the snapshot can still be accessed, even if two disks fail at the same time."
What is the fee?
There are other ways to compete.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/landing/ad/use-cases...
Or free if you go through Cloudflare since they have the bandwidth aliance.
My argument would be that this would be helpful with the high adaptation of things like Ring doorbells and other camera systems at home. Where people can store their own data and provides better security & privacy given you need not rely on a data connection to store that footage. It also would be extremely worthwhile if we are to see personalized LLMs become common and tools like home assistant. You wouldn't want that running off-site. In fact, I'd rather call home from my mobile LLM than call FAANG (or anyone else with teeth).
I just think buying used servers on ebay or trying to throw together a home rig is harder than it needs to be. I'm confident the demand exists but it is unfortunately a field of dreams scenario. Many people will not know they want it until it exists (I can say my parents would love this but they don't understand the first thing about technology so all they can do is complain about Google/Apple having all their data rather than express how they want to store their own).
The product must be "a router" so people can access it outside of home. Or it doesn't have to, but then you'll have to proxy traffic through you and charge for it.
And your "router server" must have a decent AP, because the likelyhood people know how to bridge their "routeraps" is pretty low.
IPv6 would help for sure, but there's still "allow 443 to this box", static registrations.
This is before even building the product
You're perfectly right that there is far too little tech literacy. Even with the example of my parents. But they're an example of someone who I think would especially benefit from this. Because they wouldn't get it out of their own desire, but because I their child would install it for them. Because I don't want to build and piece together everything. Because I'm used to the general tech support of them calling me up, and having to figure out literally everything on the fly because the only time I touch a Windows system is my yearly Christmas visit.
I've ran a NAS in their home before and the reason they stopped is because they got a new router and "it broke." Prior to that I was able to ssh into their network because I had a pi laying around.
But the problem you specify is not the problem you think it is. It is UI/UX. Many of these things can be set up automatically. The reason PGP is a disaster is because it's cumbersome to use. Google making it default and not having to think about it solved that. Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp made encryption trivial for people who wouldn't have done it before because "it is too hard." I'm unconvinced this is anything different. Where if you take a family member only basically tech literate, can help them do the initial setup, and away you go. You just have to make it as easy as WhatsApp (or even a lot less), and I believe you could.
I say this as someone who is a researcher and does a lot of backend programming. I know we give UI/UX people a lot of shit (and quite often they do deserve it. There are a lot of annoying useless changes), but they do also play a huge role in making technology accessible. Really, that is their main role. And truth be told, the environment has dramatically changed where now a days there's many custom distros that make things easier and even these days my Grandma can use Linux. There's definitely a hardware and backend problem here, but I'm actually convinced the biggest issue is design. Which, let's be real, is what made computers prolific in the first place.
Wuala[1][2] did something similar more than a decade ago, in that users become distributed storage for other users which made the service free for those participating (otherwise was a paid subscription). They were then acquired and stopped their most unique feature before closing for good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala
[2] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/08/first-look-wua...
Especially in a home, where kids spill a gallon of fruit juice and don’t think to tell anyone until 2 days later, pets knock things off tables, fires happen, power outages happen, theft happens, and so on.
There still needs to be a plan for when the server is gone. So, buy two home servers and run them in different locations? Back to cloud? Or what’s the plan?
How much do you think 1TB of storage should cost?
A $25/TB drive is not the only expense that $5 goes towards:
* there's actually probably 2 or more HDs holding that TB, since the business is promising that the data won't be lost
* theres the computer(s) that hold that HD.
* theres the electicity, bandwidth and space rental costs for those computers
* theres the cost of employees to make sure that the computers keep running.
* theres the cost of the marketing so that you know that the service is available
* theres all the book-keeping, taxes, cc fees, etc that need to be paid on the recurring charge
* there's (hopefully) profit for the investors/owners
and so on.
Also, on your side you should consider several of those factors yourself to do the comparrison:
* how much do you consider the time spent managing your hdds to be worth? (if you're a business this is employee-hrs, if you're talking about for yourself privately, there's still a value you should attach to your own time)
* do you have backups? If so, what does it cost to put them offsite? (In terms of space rental or favors traded, and your time)
* electricity, etc
* how much is it going to cost you to learn to reliably store your data (in terms of up-front cost, time spent, etc)
* and of course hard drive costs