In case you didn't know they invented the "Backblaze Pod" to reduce storage costs.
I don't think their costs are unreasonably low.
1 TB of double-redundant bare HDD space costs about $250 for five years (they have an interesting blog post where they candidly admit that they buy high-warranty drives and the manuf's eat the loss of drives).
Even if you manage to upload 1 TB to their servers, they still don't lose money. Just to be clear, imho 1 TB is an insane amount of data. My pictures and videos from about 3 years still total only about 100 GB.
Given the slow upstream bandwidth of most users, most people are unlikely to upload anywhere close to 1 TB.
Fair enough. For me, though, there are so many possibilities for things going wrong when it comes to storage, I'd rather not trust it to a company trying to squeeze a profit from taking in a few dollars a month - and that's before processing costs.
Also, why would I go for the cheapest option when I get so much greatness for the equivalent of buying a few coffees/beers? It's not mega money by the majority of people's standards.
I used to use Mozy and then switched to Backblaze when Mozy upped the prices. I see your point about pricing and data security, but for me I'm willing to risk it to save some money because it isn't like Backblaze is the only source of my data.
I've got the local active copy, a local backup to a home server and then Backblaze for off-site. While Backblaze could theoretically disappear any day as far as I know, the chance of all three of my data sources being lost simultaneously is very small. Small enough that if it ever happened I suspect I'd have bigger problems to worry about than my data backups.
I don't think their costs are unreasonably low.
1 TB of double-redundant bare HDD space costs about $250 for five years (they have an interesting blog post where they candidly admit that they buy high-warranty drives and the manuf's eat the loss of drives).
Even if you manage to upload 1 TB to their servers, they still don't lose money. Just to be clear, imho 1 TB is an insane amount of data. My pictures and videos from about 3 years still total only about 100 GB.
Given the slow upstream bandwidth of most users, most people are unlikely to upload anywhere close to 1 TB.