When Budman and his co-founders decided to bootstrap their own online backup service in 2007 out of their own pockets, they began by surveying potential users to find out what the perfect monthly price point was for maximum adoption.

The answer to the question of how Backblaze beat Amazon in cost per petabyte comes in multiple parts, the first of which is that Backblaze’s storage is cheap because it had to be cheap, or else the company couldn’t have launched. After all, shouldn’t S3 be cheaper, since it’s a public cloud with massive economies of scale?

Backblaze has also included a host of performance tweaks that will reduce the service’s load on your system and on your network connection.Īfter checking out Backblaze’s pitch and the details of the 2.0 release, I called the company’s co-founder, Gleb Budman, to find out how his team managed to get their storage costs down so far below Amazon S3’s rates.

Backblaze’s new 2.0 release removes both of those limitations, so that you can now use the product to back up those extremely large VMware images and 1080p home videos. Previous versions of the backup service have had a hard filesize cap of 9 GB, and the types of files you could back up were limited.

Not only is Backblaze cheap, but it’s also designed to be easy to use - install the client on your Mac or PC, and it starts backing everything up in the background, much like Apple’s Time Machine. The secret, it turns out, is all in what you optimize for.īackblaze’s basic pitch to consumers and businesses is simple: for $5 per month, you can back up an unlimited amount of data over the Internet. Skip to: Start of Article.īackblaze’s Basic Cloud Storage is 25 Times Cheaper than Amazon S3īackblaze has launched version 2.0 of its cloud backup product, and the new version brings with it a host of changes that remove even more limits from a service that has always been billed as “unlimited.” I got the chance to talk with Backblaze co-founder Gleb Budman about how the service manages to offer cloud storage that’s some 25 times cheaper than Amazon’s S3 product.

Backblaze pricing