I think it's a fair price increase because that $5 price have been there for a while.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
49 points (100.0% liked)
datahoarder
181 readers
1 users here now
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
They have to pay the rising electricity and internet bills, after all.
Agreed, plus x3 egress for free is really good
Free egress is fine and all, but as someone who uses cloud storage as a last resort, I'd want to pay less for storing that data, regardless of what it costs to get it back.
A 20% increase is a little bonkers. Do they give any reasons for this substantial increase? Computer storage prices have not gone up, from what I can see (they've gone way down from two years ago).
Back blaze is one of the OG “cheap cloud” storage providers.
They buy cheap stuff and develop cheap storage networks to charge cheap prices and stay in business. They publish entire papers on running cheap storage if you’re interested. It’s actually pretty interesting stuff.
They raised prices 20% (or $1). Hardware costs **may have gone down that much, but I’m willing to bet their energy and rent prices haven’t. They’re subject to services inflation just as much as anybody else.
Frozen pizza prices in my area have increased more in the last year than their services.
I used to use Backblaze before getting a NAS, and they were always very reasonably priced.
20% just sounds pretty harsh all at once. It's not like someone can just migrate many TB of data to a different service overnight. And it's $1 x #TB x every month. It adds up quick, unfortunately.
I'm still looking for a "cheap" cloud storage once my idrive e2 promo period ends. At some point, it's just going to be more affordable to set up another nas somewhere, especially with Synology's new full system backup with block-level incremental backup.
They do more than just tie hard drives together with a string. They build custom server hardware, maintain data center infrastructure including cooling and networking, pay their employees (the biggest cost), and all the overhead of running a business.
20% increase in one go is rather normal. Business tend to do one big price increase instead of constant small ones because our brains don't see them billing efficiently relative to their costs, they see only a bunch of tiny price increases.
Yes and now imagine that tomorrow your house flood , now you have to download all your data from Backblaze you can be sure that it will be no extra charges for downloading that data.
If my only option to recover all my data was to restore my cloud backup (which it isn't), I would not want to download TB after TB of data. I'd go with Backblaze's "restore by mail" option and just pay for $189. Any data that's important can't wait weeks to restore anyway.
I'm okay with this I only use them as one backup. Seems pretty reasonable with all the other prices hikes on energy and rent.
I was already getting free egress by going via Cloudflare (plus a small amount outside that that stayed within the free tier), so for me this is just a 20% price increase.
I hope this company remembers their roots and keeps trying to minimise costs for the end users. Since their IPO, they're expanding aggressively and built 2 new datacentres and are operating at a loss. Being a public company now they are beholden to share holders and will eventually seek to maximise profit.
Tale as old as time.
Got here after reading the email (I don't check email often); for me I'm just on the normal backup plan, but going from US$70 to US$99 is painful, it's a 41% increase, after starting with them at US$60 just a few years ago. Really starting to think going with a NAS is better for my needs.