![]() ![]() Those servers, with hard drives in tow, would then get placed into a custom server housing that they actually made out of wood. This meant that Backblaze had to get creative. In this case, creativity manifested itself as an ambitious plan to build its own high-capacity, low-cost storage servers, called "StoragePods."īackblaze hit upon a method for taking sixteen hard drives, stripped out of consumer-grade external hard drives by hand, and attaching them to a motherboard to make a simple server. So Amazon S3's pricing model was too expensive, and Backblaze didn't really have the cash to buy commercial hardware from the likes of Dell or HP. ![]() "Because we didn't have any money, we didn't have many choices," Budman says. Either way, Amazon S3 just wouldn't work for them. Backblaze would either have to charge its customers an unrealistically high pricetag, or else take a loss on their $5/month pricing goal. Amazon S3 was, and is, very cost-efficient for developers hosting a relatively modest amout of data.įor Backblaze, though, which planned on storing its customers' entire hard drives in the cloud, Amazon S3's price was too high. There was just one problem: The pricetag. The original plan was to use Amazon S3 on the backend to build Backblaze as a simple storage system that would let them host their customer's data. Which was great, but it meant that Backblaze was starting from a disadvantage. In fact, they made the mutual arrangement to go without a salary for the first year of Backblaze's existence - an arrangement that would actually extend to five years total. "At the most basic level, it makes people believe that money comes from VCs," and not from actually making sales, says Budman. The current model of the Backblaze storage pod. The thought was that taking venture cash would force Backblaze to focus on pleasing investors rather than building a sustainable business. ![]() In order to stay disciplined on building the product, Budman says, Backblaze's founders decided not to raise venture capital, instead relying on the team's pooled savings to get the business off the ground. In 2007, Backblaze was officially formed. ![]() This led to a moment of inspiration, and Budman and other one-time MailFrontier executives were gathered to build a simple, straightforward way for people to back their stuff up to an online service for a predictbale, $5/month price. That engineer was shocked to find that the relative had absolutely no backups in place. In 2007, one of the future Backblaze founders, still at SonicWall, was doing tech support for a relative who had accidentally and permanently deleted an important file. No money, no choicesīackblaze's founders met at an email security startup called MailFrontier, which was then snapped up by SonicWall in 2006, says CEO and co-founder Gleb Budman. Now, Backblaze is taking its eight years of experience with helping users back their computers up to the cloud and using it for "B2 Cloud Storage," a new service that charges a measley $0.005 per gigabyte stored - as much as six times cheaper than Amazon S3.įor price-conscious developers, that potential savings could make all the difference in the world.Īnd the really ironic part? If Amazon S3 had been cheaper eight years ago, Backblaze would never have developed the expertise it needed to compete in the first place. Right now, Amazon S3 pricing starts at three cents per gigabyte stored.īut there's a new player in the market: Backblaze, a profitable, popular startup that lets users back up as much data as they want to the cloud for $5 a month or $50 a year. Because Amazon Web Services operates at such massive scales and tremendous levels of efficiency, it's able to offer storage at an ever-shrinking cost to customers. The killer feature of Amazon S3 is price. It often indicates a user profile.Īmazon Web Services is an unstoppable juggernaut in the cloud services world, contributing a projected $7 billion to the retail giant's revenues this year alone.Ī big part of that dominance is thanks to Amazon S3, a super-popular cloud storage option that's most easily described as like Dropbox for programmers to store all the data they need for web and mobile apps.Īll of the images on Tumblr, for instance, are hosted with Amazon S3. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
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