Backblaze Scales Storage Cloud
backblaze.com
backblaze.com
Do they have a bunch of cash in the bank?
Do they have higher revenue than Cost of Business?
Do they have free cash flow? Is it growing?
A business that isn't profitable and also isn't growing is a much different beast than a company that is investing its cash reserves to grow the business.
They're a public company so you can check for yourself: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1462056/0001...
But even on a non-GAAP basis (which excludes stock-based compensation), their net income for the most recent quarter was a loss of $5.5 million.
It's fair to criticize the per-TB price increase.
Apparently they've been losing money, so from that perspective it makes sense to increase prices, but it doesn't seem like it's based on their costs going up.
(The unlimited home backup price going up is a separate matter and has much more cost-based justification.)
And how much to just pay for 1 TB up front and I never have to pay for it again?
With steady decline in storage costs, that should be a sustainable business model. It gives you upfront capital.
VC money and other investors.
Somehow people may finance an utterly losing operation for a decade or more.
I wish Backbkaze stays around though, even if they charge more. They'd still be charging less than AWS, and they seem to have a good culture / attitude.
What does that actually mean? I thought fiber was dark until it was plugged in.
Whether that first subscriber themselves considers the thing they've bought "dark fiber" or "lit fiber" once they light it up, depends on if they're made an exclusivity agreement with the provider. If they have, then the fiber is still "dark fiber" from their own perspective. If they haven't, then the fiber should be considered "lit fiber", because now that it's been set up for their use, the provider has likely put it on the market for others to lease as well, so it's not going to stay "dark" for long.
But really, these are silly terms. Customers don't care about buying "dark fiber" vs "lit fiber"; they care about buying "dedicated fiber" vs "[dedicated throughput on] shared fiber." (A lease on dedicated fiber allows for nearly-arbitrary throughput scaling over time at no additional OpEx — just the CapEx of upgrading the transceivers on either end once-a-generation or so.)
The only two things that you know by buying "dark fiber" from a peering provider, are:
1. Demand for that path was lower than predicted at the time you requested it, so there existed at least one fiber-infrastructure developer who had run some fiber along the path but not managed to sell it off to any particular peering provider yet. (Peering providers don't tend to buy-and-hold fiber without either immediate or predicted base-load demand; rather, they index available-to-purchase fiber from infra developers, offering those to their customers at snapshotted rates; they then buy the fiber from the developer in response to a customer Purchase Order, eating any loss from purchase-price volatility.)
2. You might have to pay the peering provider you're leasing from, for the initial set-up work of lighting up the fiber: routing a secondary fiber link from the optical switch in the fiber-infra developer's overland or shoreside termination point, over to the peering provider's cable hotel; terminating that fiber into a [maybe fresh] optical switch or transceiver in the cable hotel; etc.
Or, to use an analogy: You rent an unfurnished apartment. You're going to put furniture inside, of course, but you're still renting an unfurnished apartment.
and in this case made sense to proactively move to "denser" storage?