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

Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 100 posts

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#71

Post by iancarroll »

no_wizard wrote: post #66
everforward wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare practically has a stranglehold on the modern Internet. I would bet money they would be immediately profitable if they killed their free tier. There aren't that many competitors, and I don't know if they've got the spare capacity to absorb all the exodus. I'm not so sure about Backblaze. I don't even think they're the biggest player in that space (AWS is, I would guess). I would guess most people could migr…

if they simply streamlined their sales pipeline and created a mid tier (somewhere between $500-$2500 a month for example) that unlocks some of the features that are behind "contact sales" banner they could boost revenue without changing any existing tiers, I'd wager. I think the platform has a ton of potential and it already shows signs of real progress, but much like fly.io, its rough edges are incredibly rough.

This exists but isn’t really documented, we pay ~$1k/mo for a “light” enterprise version of Cloudflare.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#72

Post by jjtheblunt »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #24
nchmy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and iDrive e2 is even cheaper. https://www.idrive.com/s3-storage-e2/

Isn't iDrive a BMW trademark for decades? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_iDrive

Downvoted for a question? How laughably degenerate.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#73

Post by jjtheblunt »

sp332 wrote: post #29
jjtheblunt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't iDrive a BMW trademark for decades? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_iDrive

Trademarks only apply to specific classes of things. https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/goods-and-services

That's useful: thanks.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#74

Post by ndiddy »

everforward wrote: post #58
internetter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Backblaze is unprofitable and publicly traded So is Cloudflare

Cloudflare practically has a stranglehold on the modern Internet. I would bet money they would be immediately profitable if they killed their free tier. There aren't that many competitors, and I don't know if they've got the spare capacity to absorb all the exodus. I'm not so sure about Backblaze. I don't even think they're the biggest player in that space (AWS is, I would guess). I would guess most people could migr…

I'm not sure about Cloudflare. Their free tier vastly reduces the barrier to entry for setting up a DDoS as a service business (without it you'd need to have very expensive hardware for circumventing DDoS attacks, as otherwise you'd get DDoS'd by your competitors). This in turn increases the demand for Cloudflare's services to protect against DDoS attacks.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#75

Post by _cenw »

vineyardmike wrote: post #56
_cenw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iDrive is slow and charges extremely high fees for usage above provisioned. They also have a history of increasing prices for individual contracts only a few weeks before renewal, so you can't possibly have enough time to move your data. Hetzner Storage Boxes (2.50-3 EUR per TB) is probably the sweet spot. B2 if you need an object storage API.

Do storage boxes have any availability risk? “Storage box” sounds like you have an actual VM with an attached spinning disk, which doesn’t seem tolerant to hardware failures. I couldn’t find any details on their website about this.

They're on triple redundancy Ceph as far as I know, not geo redundant, but at that price you can buy one in Germany and one in Finland and still come out cheaper than B2.

You also only get a very locked down shell.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#76

Post by jakubadamw »

viraptor wrote: post #50
ricopags wrote: post #42

We're onboarding to Cloudflare MagicWan and want to use them for logging, which they do to 's3-compliant' buckets.... on Google or Amazon. I was pretty surprised at the lack of dogfooding, wondered if it's an oversight, on somebody's Gantt, or just not something R2 can handle for some reason.

Yeah, the integration and production readiness of their non-core offerings is not perfect. I'm dealing with R2 and another service and you can tell they fell more like... specifically integrated features, rather than fully modular services you can choose to use as you want. Like the workers have possible R2 bindings, but you can't use those in a fetch() call - you have to use S3 compatible endpoint instead. AWS has i…

> Like the workers have possible R2 bindings, but you can't use those in a fetch() call - you have to use S3 compatible endpoint instead.

Sorry, could you please elaborate? Why can you not use a binding to an R2 bucket – and perform operations on its objects – in a `fetch()` handler of a worker? Or did I misunderstand this statement?

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#77

Post by mattsan »

internetter wrote: post #33
ac29 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze is unprofitable and publicly traded, a combination which cant last forever. They raised B2 prices 20% last year, I wouldnt be surprised to see more increases if they continue to burn through cash.

> Backblaze is unprofitable and publicly traded So is Cloudflare

Cloudflare is profitable. Whales subsidise retail.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#78

Post by everforward »

ndiddy wrote: post #74
everforward wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare practically has a stranglehold on the modern Internet. I would bet money they would be immediately profitable if they killed their free tier. There aren't that many competitors, and I don't know if they've got the spare capacity to absorb all the exodus. I'm not so sure about Backblaze. I don't even think they're the biggest player in that space (AWS is, I would guess). I would guess most people could migr…

I'm not sure about Cloudflare. Their free tier vastly reduces the barrier to entry for setting up a DDoS as a service business (without it you'd need to have very expensive hardware for circumventing DDoS attacks, as otherwise you'd get DDoS'd by your competitors). This in turn increases the demand for Cloudflare's services to protect against DDoS attacks.

I'm not saying they're good for the internet, just that if I was going to make a bet on which one is more likely to survive a decade, it'd be Cloudflare.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#79

Post by internetter »

mattsan wrote: post #77
internetter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Backblaze is unprofitable and publicly traded So is Cloudflare

Cloudflare is profitable. Whales subsidise retail.

You clearly haven't read the earnings report. In December 2023, their net income was -27.86M. The've been loosing 100M a year for a few years now. To be clear, I think this is the right move from a business perspective, I'm just saying it's a little unfair to knock backblaze without mentioning this nuance.

Re: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

#80

Post by magicalhippo »

tootie wrote: post #70
no_wizard wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if they simply streamlined their sales pipeline and created a mid tier (somewhere between $500-$2500 a month for example) that unlocks some of the features that are behind "contact sales" banner they could boost revenue without changing any existing tiers, I'd wager. I think the platform has a ton of potential and it already shows signs of real progress, but much like fly.io, its rough edges are incredibly rough.

I don't work in enterprise sales or nothing, but it seems to me that businesses whose only price tag is "call us" are the ones with the most revenue. Transparent pricing is great for SMBs, but the big bucks are in making yourself entrenched in giant enterprises.

We sell a B2B application. We've had "call us" prices since the start as far as I know.

Yet even though we're now dominant in our sector, we've got about 50% of the revenue from a couple of dozen very large customers, and the remaining from many hundred medium and small businesses, including many single-person shops.

A key ingredient is that we have a usage-based pricing element, so what we charge a customer monthly varies with their activity. And it's primarily this element that is tweaked between customers, so that it's affordable to both small and large, while still making it profitable for us to provide the software and support.

Having such a varied income stream has been quite good for us, and has allowed us to turn down potential lucrative customers which had unreasonable demands that could have killed us, or be flexible when certain customers really struggled under corona say, so they didn't have to go to a competitor.

I used to be quite negative to "call us" pricing, but got a new perspective after I started here. That said, I prefer transparent pricing when shopping software on my own.

Post reply on HN