Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backblaze IPO

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 300 posts

Re: Backblaze IPO

#151

Post by jmspring »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #133
ehsankia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

I already had other (newer) computers being backed up, and this was a courtesy email to tell me I had failed to stop paying for monthly backups for a computer I had not opened (and thus synced) for years. He emailed me because the version running on that computer was considered so unstable as to be unreliable. Yes, they could have proactively canceled my bill. Maybe they would have! We'll never know, because I respon…

I recall chatting with Brian when we started Zetta. It wasn’t a match in terms of tech/direction, but I’ve been a loyal customer as well for years.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#152

Post by max46 »

ehsankia wrote: post #131
robbiemitchell wrote: post #127

Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (vers…

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

the answer is simple... either it's an employee for the marketing department who can turn anything into a positive or it's a fanboy. The page long responses that starts with textbook marketing BS ("No worries, the most important..") tells me it's from an employee because no one cares that much and actively wants people to lose data faster. The amount of buzzwords in his other response... ffs how can you guys seriously think that it's just a normal person who likes the service?! you should know better.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#153

Post by IncRnd »

pxx wrote: post #144
ehsankia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

Yeah, this is awful. I don't understand why they would also delete the data from that machine even if new data weren't flowing. What if you had needed the data from years ago? Isn't that part of the whole point of backup??

Yea, that email made no sense to me. It read as

  1) You are paying for a backup service.
  2) We decided that the version of your software is too old, even though it backed-up data.
  3) Since you are a valued customer, we will delete your data.
  4) We are a HAPPY company!  Have a great day!

Re: Backblaze IPO

#154

Post by Dylan16807 »

sltkr wrote: post #138
bryans wrote: post #110

I pay BackBlaze $7/mo to store 10TB. I feel bad about it, because they definitely don't make any money off me, and I imagine that's true for a lot of their top 5% users.

Why do you assume they make no money off that? A 10TB HDD costs about $250. At $7/month, they earn that back in 3 years, way below the mean time to failure. Of course there's overhead too, but a lot of that goes down with scale, so I'm sure they're happy with your business.

Well here is what they said two years ago:

A 9 TByte backup costs Backblaze about $35/month to provide in raw storage costs (electricity, rent for where to store the drives, etc), and that doesn't include the extra money we need to employ "G&A" people (General and Administrative)

I'm not sure why it's quite that high, but 1/60th of a server is another $150 and 1/60th of keeping that server housed and powered is going to eat another chunk of that $7 monthly fee.

And then add another 20% to all the costs to account for the capacity spent on parity.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#155

Post by Semaphor »

bryans wrote: post #110

I pay BackBlaze $7/mo to store 10TB. I feel bad about it, because they definitely don't make any money off me, and I imagine that's true for a lot of their top 5% users.

Then there are users like me, 1.6TB backed up ;)

Re: Backblaze IPO

#157

Post by brianwski »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #133
ehsankia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

I already had other (newer) computers being backed up, and this was a courtesy email to tell me I had failed to stop paying for monthly backups for a computer I had not opened (and thus synced) for years. He emailed me because the version running on that computer was considered so unstable as to be unreliable. Yes, they could have proactively canceled my bill. Maybe they would have! We'll never know, because I respon…

Hey Robbie-

I am touched you saved my email and remembered me, and that at the time you didn't respond negatively to the message. Thank you for being a customer.

The only thing I regret is that comment about version number of 2.3.1 and the claim that it would run flawlessly for a decade. Oh geez, please upgrade to 8.0.1, you won't regret it.

-- Brian Wilson, CTO Backblaze, brianw@backblaze.com

Re: Backblaze IPO

#158

Post by systemvoltage »

bryans wrote: post #110

I pay BackBlaze $7/mo to store 10TB. I feel bad about it, because they definitely don't make any money off me, and I imagine that's true for a lot of their top 5% users.

Why? If you total your car, do you feel bad that the insurance company paid $35k for a brand new car? Surely, you have not paid $35k in premiums.

Don't ever feel bad for businesses that advertise and then you happen to use the product as intended.

I think of these free-pooling companies in a similar vien as insurance firms. Some customers are very profitable and some are not. But they did the ROI for marketing it as "Unlimited" which brings new customers (again some profitable and others not so much). There is probably a regression equation that models profitability of such a business.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#159

Post by Implicated »

jlmorton wrote: post #125

I don't understand how Backblaze doesn't charge for PutObject B2 calls. I'm not complaining, I just don't understand it. At work, we have a use case where we store tens of millions of small files and mostly forget about them, never to read them again. (We later read maybe one out of a thousand, but we don't know what we'll need to read ahead of time, and the value of the files is substantial). Amazon charges us somet…

I don't know anything about the technical sides of how these services are built, but through a client I do put heavy use to the B2 service and I can tell you there are some differences (backblaze covers some of that here [0]) in the way the services work. I get the feeling some of those are how they're shaving cost.

[0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...

Re: Backblaze IPO

#160

Post by Implicated »

Implicated wrote: post #159
jlmorton wrote: post #125

I don't understand how Backblaze doesn't charge for PutObject B2 calls. I'm not complaining, I just don't understand it. At work, we have a use case where we store tens of millions of small files and mostly forget about them, never to read them again. (We later read maybe one out of a thousand, but we don't know what we'll need to read ahead of time, and the value of the files is substantial). Amazon charges us somet…

I don't know anything about the technical sides of how these services are built, but through a client I do put heavy use to the B2 service and I can tell you there are some differences (backblaze covers some of that here [0]) in the way the services work. I get the feeling some of those are how they're shaving cost. [0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...

BTW, my client is also in a similar situation where the cost to store our files on S3 is prohibitive to profit on the product, where as.. I can't believe how cheap B2 is.

~ 300 million 10-40MB jpegs, peanuts compared to what S3 was.

Post reply on HN