3 ms·
>That seems like peanuts compared to buying a set of drives, setting up, and managing a truly redundant & versioned backup solution takes home. I spent like $15
by gruez 2y ago
>That seems like peanuts compared to buying a set of drives, setting up, and managing a truly redundant & versioned backup solution takes home. I spent like $1500 on a RAID NAS a decade ago and fell behind on keeping the thing operational.
Running storage system is cheaper than you think. Look at hetzner for an upper bound on how much storage costs at scale. They offer 10 TB of storage for $31/month. It mentions having "RAID-based storage" and "backups", so this presumably includes redundancy. If you can get 4 customers paying $99/year, you're already breaking even on the server. Most people probably don't have 2.5 TB worth of stuff. Backblaze only does backups, so it isn't like dropbox where you can upload whatever you want onto it. Most people don't even have computers with 1TB storage, so you'll probably be able to fit far more than 4 customers per server. Of course, this doesn't cover salaries for your engineer or marketing people, but at least it's not like moviepass where they're selling $50 worth of movie tickets for $10.
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/ https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
- fxd123 2y ago> Most people probably don't have 2.5 TB worth of stuff. But Backblaze is marketing itself towards people who do. The average person is not a backblaze customer
- camtarn 2y agoActually, kind of the opposite. A few years ago Backblaze posted that the economics of their solution relied on the average customer having less than 1.2TB of data. They explicitly do not support Linux users because they tend to average a larger amount of data and are thus not economical to support, even ignoring the extra costs to maintain a separate Linux client.
- steveBK123 2y agoIf it’s so cheap to operate why have they continually lost money, possibly even committing accounting shenanigans to minimize the loss to a smaller number?
- gruez 2y agoSee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43804258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43804258 tl;dr R&D, marketing, and overhead.