Backblaze B2 ignites another cloud storage price war
- by Carmen Reese
- in Science
- — Sep 23, 2015
Today, however, the company is taking a step in a slightly different direction by announcing the private beta of Backblaze B2, a competitively priced cloud storage service that competes with the likes of Amazon S3 and the cloud storage services that are part of Microsoft Azure and Google's Cloud Platform. When you compare Backblaze's.005 per gigabyte cost up against AWS's S3 cost of.022 per GB, it is easy to see that organizations could want to make the switch in order to take advantage of these cost savings. It will also beat them all on per gigabyte bandwidth out the price, at $0.05. Since it is 4X cheaper, Backblaze's storage can even compete with Amazon Glacier, and be much faster to access at the same time. Developers can access it through an API and command line, but those less technical will be able to get acquainted using a web interface.
For startups like Everpix, which collapsed as it struggled to pay for huge storage costs, B2 could mean businesses that require large amounts of storage become viable. As the company's co-founder and CEO Gleb Budman told me, Backblaze made a decision to build its own storage pods and software early on, simply because buying existing servers was too expensive for the bootstrapped company.
Backblaze, the backup service company that garnered attention for publishing its internal statistics about hard drive failure rates, is throwing open the doors on a cloud storage service with rock-bottom prices. For example, the lowest-cost tier of Amazon S3 costs $0.022/GB/month. He said that he doesn't expect them to respond at first, until developers start moving away from their service - but with such low prices, that could happen incredibly quickly. "B2 is the underlying storage that services such as Dropbox would be built upon", explained Bludman.
B2 will launch into private beta in October before becoming available publicly with a service level agreement later this year.
