> currency conversion is expensive
Backblaze probably won't accept other currencies in 2018. However, we definitely have heard about this issue, and we have a feature in the works to allow you to "load up" your account with an arbitrary amount of pre-paid cash so that you pay ONE transaction fee to deposit (as an example) £250 pounds at once (incurring the £2.50 conversion fee exactly once) and then as Backblaze deducts from this account balance instead of a credit card there are zero transaction fees.
Would that help?
The OTHER reason this is a requested feature is some customers want a "reserve fund" to be used if their Credit Card payment fails, as a hedge against Backblaze deleting their data for lack of payment.
At last. I actually did abandon B2 over DO's Spaces due to the lack of this feature, despite the far more competitive pricing on your end. That, and the lack of AWS API support, but that was mostly related to my particular use case, which was the need to mount cloud storage as disk partitions using s3ql which mainly supports AWS, OpenStack and compatible services. It does have preliminary B2 support [0] but it was really hacky and I ended up losing data because of it.
Having a prepaid credit option and the option to use PayPal for such payments like DO does would have tipped me towards Backblaze's favor to the point of trying to fix s3ql's B2 support, though. ;)
Which UK bank charges £2.15 in fees or exchange rate loading, on a £0.35 transaction?
(In my experience the most a UK bank will charge for a foreign currency card transaction is 2.75%.)
Gleb from Backblaze
Are there plans to accelerate this as an offering for other providers? I think there's huge benefit in partnering with other providers where you're enabling an agnostic storage layer (any provider that needs a durable object storage system without the complexity of operationalizing one themselves). Congrats, huge Backblaze fan!
Do you have some specific providers you were interested in having connected?
This makes it more compelling for them :)
Also this opens up the possibility for someone to make a SaaS on video storage and transcoding for great value
BTW, this person is figuring out how to do transcoding of files their files in B2 as well: https://twitter.com/orlandoferrer/status/981205299532124163
Ray
I know you're in Cloud Sync, but that's really not the same thing (a one/two way sync is not a backup service).
I'm not sure if you need to give Synology a nudge or something, and I would even pay a fee for it if need be, but until then I can't use B2 as one my main backup destination for all those businesses NAS I have at various small sized companies I administrate.
Sadly it still means if the source gets corrupted for whatever reason the backup is done, for business files sync is really not backup (I don't think I'm teaching you anything there, but really this sadly doesn't fit my needs at all). Also Hyper Vault is all about the intelligent versionning.
While it's possible to trick it by doing the backup somewhere and then syncing THAT to B2 (and I do it for my personnal NAS), it's too much of a hassle and "complex" setup that I can't see myself pushing that to my customers.
OVH managed to get them to add HubiC in there so clearly there is a way. Hope you will keep pushing them until they move on it ! And thanks for making such a great product :)
My use case is download-heavy, though, and a little bit bursty (but with a long tail, a CDN doesn't really address my needs); what sort of bandwidth speeds can I expect from downloading B2 when a decent number of clients, let's say 100-500, are hitting a single object concurrently?
Anyway, thanks a lot!
I'd never heard of Packet before today but I was able to see their pricing without any issues:
I appear to have taken some weird path through the top-level "Product" menu - I'd love to say that the "Pricing" link wasn't immediately to the left of the "Product" link but at this point I'm going to have to simply claim insanity. Now that you've all steered the raving lunatic to the very transparent pricing, I'll shut up and try to find a project to justify bare-metal.
We have few PB of data there and never had any problem.
I honestly don't see any reason for anyone to use AWS or Google Cloud for object storage, except for the outbound network transfer issue from these providers.
But you're correct - we do recommend diversification, having data in multiple locations is always a best practice, and if you can have it in different vedors, all the better!
Given the other prices packet.net lists for bandwidth (Starting at 0.05/gb) i assume it's not unmetered (that's about 300 tb for 1 gbps for a month).
Side note: never heard of SlicingDice before but their website doesn't seem to be working, getting a cloudflare site offline page.
SlicingDice worked for me. Are you still getting an offline page?
That said, I am not super impressed by these first two compute providers, and probably would not trust them to give me enough nines even if they started doing FaaS. I can spin up something similar with Kubernetes on Hetzner for considerably less money...
> why single out these two providers?
They are the first two. We are very open to more!
> Shared parent company?
Backblaze is owned by employees. 100% of the board of directors work at the company every day. We have no parent company. :-)
> Cheaper peering for some reason?
Yes. We made sure any candidate partner has a direct cross connect with our locations and the data goes over pipes we own so our costs are "fixed". After you own/lease the fiber line the bandwidth is "mostly" free inside of it. I say "mostly" because we still have to pay a tiny amount for each network port on each end, some electricity, etc. But it's negligible compared to paying for bandwidth at market rates.
I wonder how realistic running analytics over stored data is.
