5 ms·

Very good info. Didn't know B2 is cheaper than S3.

by ww520 7y ago

CherryJimbo 7y ago
You're very welcome - I'm glad it was helpful. B2 is significantly cheaper than S3, especially when paired with Cloudflare for free bandwidth. If you're interested, my company Nodecraft talked about a 23TB migration we did from S3 to B2 a little while ago: https://nodecraft.com/blog/development/migrating-23tb-from-s3-to-b2-in-just-7-hours https://nodecraft.com/blog/development/migrating-23tb-from-s...
- ww520 7y ago
  How's the outgoing/ingress bandwidth comparison? Outgoing bandwidth is expensive on AWS.
  - pavanagrawal123 7y ago
    wasabi has it free and (afaik is cheaper than s3 and B2)
    - elabajaba 7y ago
      According to their documentation, Wasabi will move you on to their $0.005/GB storage $0.01/GB download plan (same price as B2 without api charges) from their $0.0059/GB storage free egress plan if you download more than your total storage (eg. with 100TB stored don't download more than 100TB/month). https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-faqs/ https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-faqs/
  - CherryJimbo 7y ago
    It's entirely free if you only use the Cloudflare-routed URLs thanks to the Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance
    - bengeren 7y ago
      How does CloudFlare themselves afford to give bandwidth for free? I understand that I can pay $20/mo for pro account but they also have a $0/mo option with fewer bells and whistles. What gives them the advantage to charge nothing for bandwidth?
      - mikehotel 7y ago
        Their terms indicate it should be used for caching html primarily. So if they find costly abusers, they could use this clause to get them to upgrade to a paid tier. > 2.8 Limitation on Non-HTML Caching The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/
      - gcb0 7y ago
        private company with lots of funding rounds? /shrug they did have (claim to have) 90m revenue last year, after 10m every year before that.
      - eastdakota 7y ago
        Because we’re peered with Backblaxe (as well as AWS). There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrangements, but, once in place, there’s no incremental cost. That’s why we have similar agreements to Backblaze in place with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, etc. It’s pretty shameful, actually, that AWS has so far refused. When using Cloudflare, they don’t pay for the bandwidth, and we don’t pay for the Bandwidth, so why are customers paying for the bandwidth. Amazon pretends to be customer-focused. This is a clear example where they’re not.
        quicksilver03 7y ago
aidenn0 7y ago
Any web service from amazon is usually on the pricey side of normal.
- viraptor 7y ago
  You get more features and higher cost. Basically B2 gives you storage, but not detailed access management, endpoint internal to your vpc, and other extras.
  - gcb0 7y ago
    which honestly, most people just use for s3 and suffer the rest because the CTO reads too much HN. amazon today mostly sells based on "you can't get fired for choosing aws", ironically.
BFLpL0QNek 7y ago
It is but I think they only have US datacenters. For backups, media and archival use-cases it looks really good for the price if you can live with it being in the US. If you are doing any large data-processing using S3 you get the advantage of data locality, with VPC endpoints you can also bypass NAT gateway data charges and get much higher bandwidth.
- trevyn 7y ago
  I think B2 is still only single-datacenter.
- votepaunchy 7y ago
  > backups, media and archival use-cases it looks really good for the price if you can live with it being in the US For these use cases S3 has lower pricing tiers (down to 0.1¢/GB-mo, matched by Azure and promised by GCP).
haywirez 7y ago
It’s cheap but it’s proving unacceptably slow for me - sometimes I see 2.5s TTFB for accessing tiny audio files in my region (Berlin, EU). Server uploads are also quite unreliable, had to write a lot of custom retry logic to handle 503 errors (~30% probability when uploading in batch). Great for it’s intended use (backups), but I’ll be switching to an S3 compatible alternative soon - eyeing Digital Ocean Spaces or Wasabi...
- trevyn 7y ago
  Had a similar experience with B2, Wasabi was much faster in my testing.
- shakna 7y ago
  Those stats sound insane to me, and certainly don't reflect what I see. I see 50ms or less TTFB, for images in the sub 200Kb range, and for videos in the 500Mb+ range, from Australia where the internet is still terrible. I've only ever a single serve upload fail me - and it occurred when an upload hit a major global outage of infrastructure. In two years of regularly uploading 8Gb/200 files a fortnight (at the least), I've never needed custom retry logic.
  - trevyn 7y ago
    If you are seeing 50ms TTFB between B2’s only datacenter (in California) and Australia, there is something wrong with your methodology or you have discovered FTL communication.
  - berkut 7y ago
    I've been seeing pretty bad upload failures (probably around 30%) for uploading hundreds of 30-40 MB files per month to B2 from New Zealand since I started using B2 over a year ago. And I'm not convinced it's connectivity issues, as I can SCP/FTP the same files to servers in the UK... When I test using an actual software client (Cyberduck) to do the same thing to B2, I see pretty much the same behaviour: retries are needed, and the total upload size (due to the retries) is generally ~20% larger than the size of the files.
derivablefunc 7y ago
Same, thank alone is very useful takeaway for me :).

Very good info. Didn't know B2 is cheaper than S3.

by ww520 7y ago

Very good info. Didn't know B2 is cheaper than S3.

You're very welcome - I'm glad it was helpful. B2 is significantly cheaper than S3, especially when paired with Cloudflare for free bandwidth. If you're interested, my company Nodecraft talked about a 23TB migration we did from S3 to B2 a little while ago: https://nodecraft.com/blog/development/migrating-23tb-from-s3-to-b2-in-just-7-hours https://nodecraft.com/blog/development/migrating-23tb-from-s...

ww520 7y ago
How's the outgoing/ingress bandwidth comparison? Outgoing bandwidth is expensive on AWS.
- pavanagrawal123 7y ago
  wasabi has it free and (afaik is cheaper than s3 and B2)
  - elabajaba 7y ago
    According to their documentation, Wasabi will move you on to their $0.005/GB storage $0.01/GB download plan (same price as B2 without api charges) from their $0.0059/GB storage free egress plan if you download more than your total storage (eg. with 100TB stored don't download more than 100TB/month). https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-faqs/ https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-faqs/
- CherryJimbo 7y ago
  It's entirely free if you only use the Cloudflare-routed URLs thanks to the Bandwidth Alliance: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance
  - bengeren 7y ago
    How does CloudFlare themselves afford to give bandwidth for free? I understand that I can pay $20/mo for pro account but they also have a $0/mo option with fewer bells and whistles. What gives them the advantage to charge nothing for bandwidth?
    - mikehotel 7y ago
      Their terms indicate it should be used for caching html primarily. So if they find costly abusers, they could use this clause to get them to upgrade to a paid tier. > 2.8 Limitation on Non-HTML Caching The Service is offered primarily as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless explicitly included as a part of a Paid Service purchased by you, you agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/ https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/
    - gcb0 7y ago
      private company with lots of funding rounds? /shrug they did have (claim to have) 90m revenue last year, after 10m every year before that.
    - eastdakota 7y ago
      Because we’re peered with Backblaxe (as well as AWS). There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrangements, but, once in place, there’s no incremental cost. That’s why we have similar agreements to Backblaze in place with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, etc. It’s pretty shameful, actually, that AWS has so far refused. When using Cloudflare, they don’t pay for the bandwidth, and we don’t pay for the Bandwidth, so why are customers paying for the bandwidth. Amazon pretends to be customer-focused. This is a clear example where they’re not.
      - quicksilver03 7y ago

aidenn0 7y ago

Any web service from amazon is usually on the pricey side of normal.

viraptor 7y ago
You get more features and higher cost. Basically B2 gives you storage, but not detailed access management, endpoint internal to your vpc, and other extras.
- gcb0 7y ago
  which honestly, most people just use for s3 and suffer the rest because the CTO reads too much HN. amazon today mostly sells based on "you can't get fired for choosing aws", ironically.

BFLpL0QNek 7y ago

It is but I think they only have US datacenters. For backups, media and archival use-cases it looks really good for the price if you can live with it being in the US. If you are doing any large data-processing using S3 you get the advantage of data locality, with VPC endpoints you can also bypass NAT gateway data charges and get much higher bandwidth.

trevyn 7y ago
I think B2 is still only single-datacenter.
votepaunchy 7y ago
> backups, media and archival use-cases it looks really good for the price if you can live with it being in the US For these use cases S3 has lower pricing tiers (down to 0.1¢/GB-mo, matched by Azure and promised by GCP).

haywirez 7y ago

It’s cheap but it’s proving unacceptably slow for me - sometimes I see 2.5s TTFB for accessing tiny audio files in my region (Berlin, EU). Server uploads are also quite unreliable, had to write a lot of custom retry logic to handle 503 errors (~30% probability when uploading in batch). Great for it’s intended use (backups), but I’ll be switching to an S3 compatible alternative soon - eyeing Digital Ocean Spaces or Wasabi...

trevyn 7y ago
Had a similar experience with B2, Wasabi was much faster in my testing.
shakna 7y ago
Those stats sound insane to me, and certainly don't reflect what I see. I see 50ms or less TTFB, for images in the sub 200Kb range, and for videos in the 500Mb+ range, from Australia where the internet is still terrible. I've only ever a single serve upload fail me - and it occurred when an upload hit a major global outage of infrastructure. In two years of regularly uploading 8Gb/200 files a fortnight (at the least), I've never needed custom retry logic.
- trevyn 7y ago
  If you are seeing 50ms TTFB between B2’s only datacenter (in California) and Australia, there is something wrong with your methodology or you have discovered FTL communication.
- berkut 7y ago
  I've been seeing pretty bad upload failures (probably around 30%) for uploading hundreds of 30-40 MB files per month to B2 from New Zealand since I started using B2 over a year ago. And I'm not convinced it's connectivity issues, as I can SCP/FTP the same files to servers in the UK... When I test using an actual software client (Cyberduck) to do the same thing to B2, I see pretty much the same behaviour: retries are needed, and the total upload size (due to the retries) is generally ~20% larger than the size of the files.

derivablefunc 7y ago

Same, thank alone is very useful takeaway for me :).