Backblaze Halves Cost Of Cloud Storage Downloads

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has halved the cost of downloading data from its cloud as a way to make it easier for MSPs and solution providers to provide cloud-based data services.

Backblaze is the developer of the Backblaze B2 storage cloud, which is offered as the back-end cloud to a number of storage service provider vendors that sell through channel partners, said Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of the San Mateo, Calif.-based company.

These include New York-based CloudBerry Lab; Bellevue, Wash.-based Synology; Pomona, Calif.-based Qnap; and Walnut Creek, Calif.-based Retrospect.

[Related: The 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Vendors Of The 2017 Cloud 100]

Backblaze currently stores about 500 petabytes of data for customers. The data sits on the company's own infrastructure located in multiple co-location facilities. Budman told CRN that the 500 petabytes is a good amount of data when one considers that's about half the size stored by Dropbox and about one-fourth the amount of data stored by Facebook.

Backblaze charges $0.005 per GB, per month to store data, or about one-fourth the per-GB price of Amazon S3, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure, Budman said. With the new lower download pricing, customers pay about 1 cent per GB of data to download data for recovery or data migration purposes, regardless of the number of GBs downloaded, he said.

While Backblaze B2 is available for customers who wish to connect directly to its raw storage capacity, the majority connect via MSPs who work with cloud storage service providers that use Backblaze B2 on their back ends, Budman said. "Most customers can't write to our APIs," he said.

Backblaze B2 was developed as a backup cloud for consumers, but many of the customers coming directly to the service are looking to back up their server data, Budman said.

"But we don't back up servers," he said. "We send these customers to our partners, who can enable the customers to use our service."

Michael Strong, co-owner and chief operating officer at Blue Layer IT, a Lubbock, Texas-based MSP serving SMBs and a partner with Backblaze via the CloudBerry Lab service, told CRN that MSPs can see a new backup vendor every week.

"We've been in business for 15 years," Strong said. "I don't know how often we've changed backup vendors. A new kid comes on the block with lower pricing all the time."

Blue Layer IT eventually started working with CloudBerry Lab, which provides a brandable cloud storage front end, and chose the Backblaze B2 option for the back end, Strong said.

The amount of data Blue Layer IT stores for customers has risen from just over 10 TBs a year ago to about 100 TBs today, Strong said. "Backblaze's pricing lets us worry less about what to back up, and instead just back everything up," he said. "What I pay to back up 100 TBs of data today is significantly less that what I paid for 10 TBs with our prior vendor."

Backblaze B2 provides the performance and reliability Blue Layer IT's customers need, Strong said. "We haven't had any trouble," he said. "The back-end reporting shows the buckets of data on a per-customer basis. Nine months ago, I was all over the Backblaze website to understand the service. I haven't gone back since we signed up. There's no need to. Everything just works."