Backblaze is ready to take on the big boys in the cloud storage space by launching a service that significantly undercuts everyone else on price.
First reported by TechCrunch, Backblaze B2 has just opened up its private beta to give companies a comparable alternative to the likes of Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google's Cloud Platform that costs a lot less.
The storage service is priced at $0.05 per GB per month, which is half that of Amazon Glacier, AWS's sluggish cold storage offering, and a fourth of the price of the regular speed Amazon S3 service. It also compares similarly to cloud storage offerings from Microsoft Azure and Google. CEO Gleb Budman is quite clear that price is where the company can and will compete.
Who is Backblaze?
Backblaze has been around since 2007 and is more used to providing a consumer and enterprise back-up service that is made up of 150 petabytes of data, 10 billion files on its servers and well known for the amount of hard drives bought to power it.
The company thinks that users will flock to Backblaze B2 to store images, videos and other documents although some will choose to store large research data sets using it.
In the first instance it will consist of a free tier (up to 10GB storage, 1GB/day of outbound traffic and unlimited inbound bandwidth) with pricing ranging upwards from there. Developers can access it through an API and command line, but those less technical will be able to get acquainted using a web interface.
A private beta is open right now and it will be ready for public consumption before the end of 2015.
