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> That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company. Stating the obvious: Backblaze

> That’s a trivial number of parts and vendors for a hardware company, but stating the obvious, Backblaze is a software company. Stating the obvious: Backblaze wants investors to value them like a SaaS company. This blog post suggests they’re more of a logistics and product company— huge capex and depreciating assets on hand. As a customer, I like their product, but they’re no Dropbox. If they would allow personal NAS then I could see them being a software company.

ahmedalsudani 5y ago
It's easy to buy a bunch of hard drives and connect in a data center. Managing petabytes per user for thousands of users is the hard part, and it's a software problem. BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company... though the quality of their offering certainly lags behind Dropbox, both in terms of feature set and user experience. They're also in a very competitive industry. Storage/backup is basically a commodity nowadays.
- kag0 5y ago
  > BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company agreed, but I think s3 is the more realistic comparison than dropbox
  - ahmedalsudani 5y ago
    100%. It’s why their margins are way leaner.
wmf 5y ago
Dropbox owns more hardware than Backblaze.
ricardobeat 5y ago
I sync my NAS to Backblaze B2 without any issues, and pricing is great.
- choppaface 5y ago
  Yeah but I don't want to pay B2 prices. I don't have a PB, but I have more than I'd really like to hang off one machine.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    1TB = $5 on B2. It's pretty great pricing, and there is no reason for them to give you that for free in the backup plan, when it would obviously be at a loss. The "unlimited" plan pricing reflects the fact that very few people carry 1TB+ laptops around.
chx 5y ago
For me the Big Deal is Backblaze B2. Especially when fronted by Cloudflare -- zero traffic costs. Storage is cheap as far as cloud storage provider goes and traffic is decidedly the cheapest possible.
- deskamess 5y ago
  Even for streaming of video files? I thought you had to use Cloudflares other product for that.
  - adityapatadia 5y ago
    We tried to use B2 for storing image and video files. First byte out is very slow (as expected). We however experienced bigger issues where if you try to upload millions of files per minute in their system, it crumbles. Huge amount of errors were thrown and their support could not help. We decided to stick with king of storage AWS S3.
    - chx 5y ago
      > if you try to upload millions of files per minute may I suggest this might not be a typical usecase?
      - adityapatadia 5y ago
        Yeah, :D But when someone hands over a storage system, temptation is high to store everything on it.
  - chx 5y ago
    Please read https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze_cloudflare_for_streaming_videos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze... especially https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze_cloudflare_for_streaming_videos/gqg57ct/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze...

ahmedalsudani 5y ago

It's easy to buy a bunch of hard drives and connect in a data center. Managing petabytes per user for thousands of users is the hard part, and it's a software problem. BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company... though the quality of their offering certainly lags behind Dropbox, both in terms of feature set and user experience. They're also in a very competitive industry. Storage/backup is basically a commodity nowadays.

kag0 5y ago
> BackBlaze is definitely a SaaS company agreed, but I think s3 is the more realistic comparison than dropbox
- ahmedalsudani 5y ago
  100%. It’s why their margins are way leaner.

wmf 5y ago

Dropbox owns more hardware than Backblaze.

ricardobeat 5y ago

I sync my NAS to Backblaze B2 without any issues, and pricing is great.

choppaface 5y ago
Yeah but I don't want to pay B2 prices. I don't have a PB, but I have more than I'd really like to hang off one machine.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  1TB = $5 on B2. It's pretty great pricing, and there is no reason for them to give you that for free in the backup plan, when it would obviously be at a loss. The "unlimited" plan pricing reflects the fact that very few people carry 1TB+ laptops around.

chx 5y ago

For me the Big Deal is Backblaze B2. Especially when fronted by Cloudflare -- zero traffic costs. Storage is cheap as far as cloud storage provider goes and traffic is decidedly the cheapest possible.

deskamess 5y ago
Even for streaming of video files? I thought you had to use Cloudflares other product for that.
- adityapatadia 5y ago
  We tried to use B2 for storing image and video files. First byte out is very slow (as expected). We however experienced bigger issues where if you try to upload millions of files per minute in their system, it crumbles. Huge amount of errors were thrown and their support could not help. We decided to stick with king of storage AWS S3.
  - chx 5y ago
    > if you try to upload millions of files per minute may I suggest this might not be a typical usecase?
    - adityapatadia 5y ago
      Yeah, :D But when someone hands over a storage system, temptation is high to store everything on it.
- chx 5y ago
  Please read https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze_cloudflare_for_streaming_videos/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze... especially https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze_cloudflare_for_streaming_videos/gqg57ct/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/m0gtmf/backblaze...