Comment by Lex-2008 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lex-2008 | Hacker News Reader

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I like your comparison with self-built storage, but comparing $20/TB/month with other CLOUD offerings, we see:

* hetzner storage box starts from $4/month for 1TB, and then goes down to $2.4/TB/month if you rent a 10TB box.

* mega starts from €10/month for 2TB, and goes down to €2/TB/month if you get a 16TB plan

* backblaze costs (starts from?) $6/TB/month

I was looking for a cheap cloud storage recently, so have a a list of these numbers :)

Moreover, these are not even the cheapest one. The cheapest one I found had prices starting from $6.5 for 5TB, going down to $0.64/TB/month for plans starting with 25TB (called uloz, but I haven't tested them yet).

Also, looking at lowendbox you can find a VPS in Canada with 2TB storage for $5/month and run whatever you want there.

How all that compares to $20/TB/month?!

Please feel free to correct me if i'm comparing apples to oranges, though. But I can't believe all of these offers are scam or so-called "promotional" offers which cost companies more than you pay for it.

Thank You. So backblaze for $6/TB a month. I could have a TB of Data backed up safely against file corruption? I wonder how have I missed that.

Now you could use it with Synology NAS and it is a lot cheaper than doing RAID 5 for ZFS / BTRFS with Muti redundancy.

I wonder if there are any NAS that does that automatically? Any drawbacks? Also wonder if the price could go down to $5 / TB in a few years time.

The price of Backblaze WAS $5 a few years ago and they increased it to $6 (and added some free bandwidth).

I'm still annoyed they increased the price for B2. Maybe "free" bandwidth gets people to use it more? But as far as their costs go, between the time they launched at $5 and the time they upped it to $6, hard drives (and servers full of hard drives) cost half as much per TB, with 1/4 as many servers needed for the same number of TB.

I get the impression that business has always been about being the best schmoozer more than about having the best product.

BTW at Hetzner you can rent servers with very large (hundred of TB) non-redundant storage for an effective price of about $1.50/TB/month. If you want to build a cloud storage product, that seems like a good starting point - of course, once you take into account redundancy, spare capacity, and paying yourself, the prices you charge to your customers will end up closer to the price of Backblaze at a minimum.

>I get the impression that business has always been about being the best schmoozer more than about having the best product

and thus, market efficiency feels like a myth. This feels most true when it comes to cloud services. They're way overpriced in multiple different common cases at the big providers

Yes, this is pretty much what Hetzner must have built with their object storage - and they get to 5 EUR/month, so really close to Backblaze pricing.

Of what you mentioned, only backblaze is similar (object storage with S3-like API), all others are apples to oranges.

You don't need very many terabytes to cover the labor cost of installing and maintaining an S3-compatible server program.

You need a very big cluster for it to be worth it though for non-backup use-cases when using HDDs.

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