Or, he suggested, B2 could actually open up a whole new market for backing up companies’ data that’s primarily stored in Amazon’s popular S3 storage service.

Image courtesy of Backblazeīudman says he’s spoken with a potential customer who was going to build a new data center to store petabytes of storage, but is considering Backblaze B2 instead because of the low cost.

“B ut if what you need is somewhere to put a lot of data,” he said, “this is a very competitive offering.” An example of the B2 user interface. The least expensive price tiers for popular cloud storage options from larger providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft (MSFT)-which are only available to users storing huge volumes-cost at least 4 times that much.Īmazon’s newish Glacier service, which offers cheaper storage and slower access for data that companies need to reach less frequently, costs $.007 per gigabyte in most cases.īackblaze founder and CEO Gleb Budman acknowledges that B2 probably won’t win over the majority of storage workloads now running on other platforms, especially if users need very high performance or computing located near their data. In terms of straight-up storage, B2 will cost a flat rate of $.005 (or half a cent) per gigabyte per month.

So rather than storing compressed, encrypted, fully indexed versions of entire hard drives, they can store individual objects and files that load much faster and are easily accessible by software programs.Īnd B2, which will be available to private beta users in October, is still cheap. Backblaze has always prided itself on providing possibly the world’s least-expensive service for backing up data-$50 a year for unlimited storage-but its new product, called B2, targets data that developers and companies still want to access.

B2 backup pricing