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Good question! As part of the process for developing these we spend months and months using AGILE/SCRUM to iterate and come up with a "final answer" (though we'
by atYevP 11y ago
Good question! As part of the process for developing these we spend months and months using AGILE/SCRUM to iterate and come up with a "final answer" (though we're constantly still iterating). So it's not so much that we gain anything from writing the posts, the posts are more of a culmination of months of effort. We do end up talking about the pods more closely when we're writing the posts and as part of that some minor changes do happen, but not that many.
The sinister benefit is that the more folks read the posts, the more it gets shared (presumably) and we hope that can lead to some new folks finding out about our online backup service, and therefore signing up. Which would make our finance department feel warm and fuzzy too!
- mikeash 11y agoI imagine the marketing angle must be pretty big. Not only making people aware of your service, but convincing people to use it. A big question when selecting any online backup service is, "are these people I'm trusting with my data complete idiots?" Your posts should really help convince a lot of people that you are, in fact, not complete idiots. For what it's worth, I've been a happy customer for years and try to spread the love whenever I can. My mantra is: data that's not backed up doesn't exist, and data that's not backed up off-site is not backed up. Thanks for providing a great service for cheap.
- atYevP 11y agoYou'd think it would be HUGE but it's not, just a side-benefit. We'd love for it to be bigger, but, it's kind of up to the people. If you're a happy Backblaze customer though...might I refer you to our handy dandy referral program: https://www.backblaze.com/refer.html https://www.backblaze.com/refer.html /MarketingOff *Edit -> man, we have to optimize that page for our new design layout... /yells at design team.
- mikeash 11y agoThanks for the link. I was actually going to write something in my comment like, "hey, you guys should have a referral program." Then I realized I ought to check to see if you already did first.
- atYevP 11y agoWe do, but man do I gotta get that page updated. Looks like we forgot about it while updating the site. Sad panda bears.
- budmang 11y agoWe have gotten some other benefits as well. One of our senior support reps decided to join us after reading an IAmA where we talked about the Storage Pods. We just recently hired a senior sys admin and the head of Facebook's Prineville data center, both of whom were a result of reading our storage posts. Also, when we work with contract manufacturers on building storage pods, talk with data centers about space, etc., it's really convenient to point to public posts to explain what we're talking about rather than having to put NDA's in place. Overall it results in a lot of awareness and goodwill. It's incredibly gratifying after the team spends many late nights putting these together. Gleb from Backblaze
- bartvk 11y agoThe way you guys keep blogging, it's simply an enormous positive experience. I've been a vocal advocate of BackBlaze online and offline. Lots of even cheaper services come and go, but I keep relying and pointing to BackBlaze.
- coldtea 11y agoCan you guys enable "non attached" external disk backups? Put a cap on the size or make it a different tier.
- atYevP 11y agoWe're sort of doing that with B2, read more about it: www.backblaze.com/b2 :D
- coldtea 11y agoLooks nice! Does it got any kind of integration with stuff you've uploaded through the regular Backblaze app? (e.g. moving stuff over to B2 once it has been uploaded as a regular BB backup).
- atYevP 11y agoWe're treating them like two different products, so no integration yet, but if we see that a sizeable of folks would want to do both or transfer their data over, we might go down that path.
- coldtea 11y agoI think it would solve the "user-accessible UI" for making the initial move of the data to storage. I can write some script myself to move over my stuff directly, but even as a programmer I'd rather not :-) I think you're plan for it is that third parties might take that task. So, maybe Arq will. https://twitter.com/arqbackup/status/650634416067342336 https://twitter.com/arqbackup/status/650634416067342336
- atYevP 11y agoArq says they have no plans to do it in the near term at the moment, but hopefully once we open it to the public they'll want to integrate. Worst case, if we make a bajillion dollars, we'll hire some more devs to whip something together :P