Over the coming months, Backblaze will make big updates and upgrades to both our products—B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup. Considering the volume of new stuff on the horizon, I’m dropping into the blog today to explain what’s happening, when, and why for our customers as well as any others who are considering adopting our services. Here’s what’s new.

B2 Cloud Storage Updates

Price, Egress, and Product Upgrades

Meeting and exceeding customers’ needs for building applications, protecting data, supporting media workflows, and more is the top priority for B2 Cloud Storage. To further these efforts, we’ll be implementing the following updates:

Price Changes

Storage Price: Effective October 3, 2023, we are increasing the monthly pay-as-you-go storage rate from $5/TB to $6/TB. The price of B2 Reserve will not change.

Free Egress: Also effective October 3, we’re making egress free (i.e. free download of data) for all B2 Cloud Storage customers—both pay-as-you-go and B2 Reserve—up to three times the amount of data you store with us, with any additional egress priced at just $0.01/GB. Because supporting an open cloud environment is central to our mission, expanding free egress to all customers so they can move data when and where they prefer is a key next step.

Backblaze B2 Upgrades

From Object Lock for ransomware protection, to Cloud Replication for redundancy, to more data centers to support data location needs, Backblaze has consistently improved B2 Cloud Storage. Stay tuned for more this fall, when we’ll announce upload performance upgrades, expanded integrations, and more partnerships.

Things That Aren’t Changing

Storage pricing on committed contracts, B2 Reserve pricing, and unlimited free egress between Backblaze B2 and many leading content delivery network (CDN) and compute partners are all not changing. 

Why the Changes for B2 Cloud Storage?

1. Continuing to provide the best cloud storage.

I am excited that B2 Cloud Storage continues to be the best high-quality and low-cost alternative to traditional cloud providers like AWS for businesses of all sizes. After seven years in service with no price increases, the bar was very high for considering any change to our pricing. We invest in making Backblaze B2 a better cloud storage provider every day. A price increase enables us to continue doing so into the future.

2. Advancing the freedom of customers’ data.

We’ve heard from customers that one of the greatest benefits of B2 Cloud Storage is freedom—freedom from complexity, runaway bills, and data lock-in. We wanted to double down on these benefits and further empower our customers to leverage the open cloud to use their data how and where they wish. Making egress free supports all these benefits for our customers.

Backblaze Computer Backup

Price, Version History, Version 9.0, and Admin Upgrades

To expand our ability to provide astonishingly easy computer backup that is as reliable as it is trustworthy and affordable, we’re instituting the following updates to Backblaze Computer Backup and sharing some upcoming product upgrades:

• Computer Backup Pricing: Effective October 3, new purchases and renewals will be $9/month, $99/year, and $189 for two-year subscription plans, and Forever Version History pricing will be $0.006/GB/month.
  
• Free One Year Extended Version History: Also effective October 3, all Computer Backup licenses may add One Year Extended Version History, previously a $2 per month expense, for free. Being able to recover deleted or altered files up to a year later saves Computer Backup users from huge headaches, and now this benefit is available to all subscribers. Starting October 3, log in to your account and select One Year of Extended Version History for free. 
  
• Version 9.0: In September, the release of Version 9.0 will go live. Among some improvements to performance and usability, this release includes a highly requested new local restore experience for end users. We’ll share all the details with you in September when Version 9.0 goes live.
  
• Groups Administration Upgrades: In addition to Version 9.0, we’ve got an exciting roadmap of upgrades to our Groups functionality aimed at serving our growing and evolving customer base. For those who need to manage everything from two to two thousand workstations, we’re excited to offer more peace of mind and control with expanded tools built for the enterprise at a price still ahead of the competition.

Why the Change for Computer Backup?

Since launching Computer Backup in 2008, we’ve stayed committed to a product that backs up all your data automatically to the cloud for a flat rate. Over the following 15 years, the average amount of data stored per user has grown tremendously, and our investments to build out our storage cloud to support that growth has increased to keep pace. 

At the same time, we’ve continued to invest in improving the product—as we have been recently with the upcoming release of Version 9.0, in our active development of new Group administration features, and in the free addition of optional One Year Extended Version history for all users. And, we still have more to do to ensure our product consistently lives up to its promise. 

To continue offering unlimited backup, innovating, and adding value to the best computer backup service, we need to align our pricing with our costs.

Thank You

We understand how valuable your data is to your business and your life, and the trust you place in Backlaze every day is not lost on me. We are deeply committed to our mission of making storing, using, and protecting that data astonishingly easy, and the updates I’ve shared today are a big step forward in ensuring we can do so for the long haul. So, in closing, I’ll say thank you for entrusting us with your precious data—we’re honored to serve you. 

FAQ: B2 Cloud Storage

FAQ: Computer Backup

The post Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Today we announced that Backblaze shareholders voted to eliminate our dual class share structure. For most of our readers, I’m guessing this news flash might be more “???” than “!!!,” but I’ll explain what it means, why it’s an exciting moment for Backblaze and its shareholders, and how it ties back to our business and our commitment to our core values of transparency and accountability.

First Things First: What Does It Mean for You?

If you’re one of our hundreds of thousands of customers and partners—this has no impact for you.

If you’re one of our shareholders or investors: We believe this is 100% good news for you as it gives you an equal say in our business. But you don’t have to do anything—this change happens entirely on our end.

For Everyone Who Is Still Wondering: What Is a Dual Class Structure?

In short, for public companies, a dual class structure means that there are different types of share classes that have different rights. Often, these rights have to do with voting privileges. For example, previously Backblaze had two classes of common stock: Class A and Class B. Class A shareholders get one vote for every share of the company they own. Class B shareholders get ten votes for every one share they own. These are often referred to as “super-voting” shares.

When shareholders would vote on shareholder proposals, the Class B shareholders would theoretically have more sway than Class A folks due to the greater voting rights. After today, this is all a lot simpler and more equal as we only have one class of shares and shareholders.

Why Ever Have a Dual Class Structure?

Roughly 30% of newly public tech companies go out with a dual class structure. Often founder-led companies, like ours, are advised to use dual class structures at the outset to help maintain continuity and focus in the initial years as a public company.

Why Are Backblaze Shareholders Getting Rid of Dual Class?

• It is fair and good. Being “Fair & Good” is one of our core values. After receiving feedback from various shareholders, potential investors, and corporate governance practitioners that a dual class stock structure is seen as negative by some, we aligned that supporting a single share class is “fair & good” both for corporate governance and for shareholders.
• It is no longer necessary. This November marks two years since our debut as a public company. We feel that our strategy and values are well aligned and ingrained with our path as a public company. Metaphorically speaking, the training wheels are unnecessary.
• It delivers equality for shareholders. Having a single class of shareholders supports our belief in shareholder democracy and continues our efforts toward empowering those who choose to invest in our business. We also believe this broadens the potential group of investors in our business by enabling a level playing field.

Here are the more technical details about the change: Backblaze Class B shares will be converted to Class A shares on July 6, 2023. The conversion has no effect on the economic rights of holders of shares of Class A common stock or Class B common stock, except for the elimination of the different voting powers of the two classes of stock.

Why Talk About This At All?

Backblaze IPO’d because it aligned with our company values and long-term goals, and we’ve benefitted from feedback from shareholders, in-depth industry analyses, and expert direction from our board and others. Part of getting that feedback is sharing out as much as we can about the process. Transparency is, after all, another one of our key values, so sharing the thinking behind this decision is as important as making it, from our perspective.

Looking Forward

As we move into our next phase of growth as the leading specialized storage cloud, we’re happy we can do so with each voice having equal weight. This is an exciting moment for Backblaze shareholders and we are grateful to see this positive change come to fruition.

The post Backblaze Shareholders Eliminate Dual-Class Share Structure appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Taking a company public is an investment. At Backblaze, we spent more than $10 million* in connection with our IPO and learned a lot in the process. Now, all that knowledge is yours for free. Why? We’re open sourcing our IPO.

In the tech world, the open source movement has long promoted growth, innovation, and collaboration. The push to democratize code is such a powerful thing that it is credited with the rapid expansion of technological innovation in recent decades. And yet, while open sourcing is widespread in our industry, you don’t find it in many others.

Some of the most common and repetitive business practices are still not well understood. The IPO process, for example, is as cryptic as the most jealously guarded algorithms for anyone who hasn’t been through it, and for no good reason. Entrepreneurs and business leaders often enter into this process not entirely blind, but without the building blocks those who IPO’d before had constructed. It doesn’t make sense.

When Backblaze went public in 2021, we found ourselves wondering why there wasn’t a better roadmap available to any entrepreneur who dared to take the IPO path. It’s an investment not only of management time, but also a significant amount of financial resources. Having more information going into it is never a bad thing.

Last year, I wrote about why you should go IPO, but in this series what I really want to do is open source our IPO process and share every step along the way: who to talk to, what to chase, what to build. I want any business leader to be able to use this series as a foundation along the journey to IPO. An IPO will still be an investment, but you’ll be armed with the knowledge to make it lean and mean. (And whether you actually go public or not is beside the point—the preparation takes your business to a whole new level.)

The Backblaze Way

In the 20 years leading up to 2021—the year Backblaze was listed—around 4,500 companies went public, and yet there was still no definitive resource for us to follow when we started out. It wasn’t just that the roadmap was unclear, the process was also clouded by perceptions of what type of company could make the journey. The message we frequently heard was that without lots of media buzz, multiple rounds of traditional venture capital (VC) funding, public declarations of money raised, revenue above $100M, and lofty growth metrics, don’t even bother getting started.

But we’d already taken a different route to get where we were, bootstrapping our way to profitability and growth without following the road most traveled and the structure that provides, so we weren’t afraid to do the same thing in an IPO. It created some unique obstacles, but it worked for us, and we hope other entrepreneurs and business leaders can leverage our learnings, avoid our mistakes, and find some of the same benefits we did in going public.

Potential Stumbling Blocks

The road to IPO was something we thought about from day one of our company, but we started moving along it more seriously in early 2020.

We had some excellent advisors and mentors guiding our first steps (and if you’re contemplating an IPO, I highly, highly recommend starting to seek out folks with experience with IPOs who can help guide you along the way). At the same time, I wanted to make sure I was developing my own understanding of the process and forming my own opinions. My research included everything from digging deep into the resources shared by outside counsel to a late night “how to IPO” Google search (with limited results).

So what would have been most helpful to me at the time? What were the gray areas? What resources could have made all the difference at the beginning of the process? Below are the key points that I would give myself if I could go back in time, and they form the backbone of my thinking as I’ve begun to open source our experience for you.

How to IPO: The Things That Should Keep You Up at Night

• The Unicorn CFO: We all know the importance of the CFO in the IPO process, but when the markets are strong and many companies are marching towards a public offering, CFOs with IPO-specific experience are rare. Can we start with a head of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A)? A controller? What’s right for our company?
• General Guidance from General Counsel (GC): At the end of 2019, our in-house legal team was essentially nonexistent. We needed to hire a GC to help us navigate many of the nuanced IPO best practices, but where else should they provide guidance? Your GC should instruct you on how to start thinking and acting like a public company and direct your executive team on the specific roles they should play.
• What Is My Role in All of This?: As a CEO, I naturally wanted to have my hands in every part of the IPO process. But, that was impractical and impossible. For example, I needed to play a very specific role as chief executive in the drafting of the S-1. (That’s the document you file with the SEC when you want to go public.) I had to approach the document with company vision/storytelling as my main focus—to ensure the picture we were painting of the company’s future was neither slanted by the desires of the market, nor overshadowed by legal and financial jargon.
• Avoiding Fyre Festival: While on one hand you want to deliver a strong company narrative, many entrepreneurs can get carried away. You want to make sure you’re not telling a story you can’t deliver on. I don’t fault anyone for building a vision, but when thousands of influencers wind up in FEMA tents on a remote Caribbean island, you’ve taken your business narrative too far.
• Systems, Processes, & People: These are the core components necessary to have in place for a successful IPO. When we started having the IPO conversations, ours were sufficient for the operations at a scrappy startup. I thought we had been informally putting the right infrastructure in place as we scaled, but preparing for an IPO takes a more concerted and intentional effort.

The Tip of the Iceberg

What I’ve touched on above is truly just the tip of the iceberg—something to get you thinking. In the rest of this series, I plan to dig deep into the inner workings of the IPO and share my insights—plus, many of the materials, planning docs, decks, spreadsheets, and more—with full transparency.

Here are some of the topics on deck for the rest of the year:

• Building the Foundation: If you want to take your startup public, what’s the best way to set yourself up for success as you grow?
• IPO Readiness: The opportunity stars have aligned. What does it take to actually be ready to take advantage of it?
• Making the Call: When are you ready to pull the trigger and how does your mentality need to change?
• Building the IPO Machine: What cogs are essential for the IPO machine, and how and when do you select them? Think bankers, analysts, executive team members, etc. And what if you pick wrong?
• Storytelling: How to sell success and navigate the S-1.
• Old Friends: Managing morale and focus.
• The Roadshow: Storytelling beyond the S-1: How does it work and how do you prepare?
• Notes on Not Drowning: Testing the waters.
• The Final Steps: What are the final details you need to consider and what could go wrong?
• IPO Day: My experience and key learnings.

In the meantime, please let me know in the comments if there’s anything in particular you’d like to learn more about as we help more businesses grow better.

The post Open Sourcing the IPO appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

We took Backblaze public one year ago tomorrow. Our IPO was a great day and the realization of 14 years of hard work by our team. Since then, we’ve executed on our plans, hit our targets, and continued to grow our team and our revenue. And yet, the markets have been tough sledding. For newly-public tech companies like us, as well as many of our peers, stock values have decreased by ~70% from their peak values last year. It’s hard for shareholders, employees, and the market.

Obviously I wish the last 10 months would have gone differently in the markets, who doesn’t? But when people ask me, (which happens a lot) “Do you still think the IPO was a good idea?” There’s no question in my mind that it was one of the best business decisions we’ve made at Backblaze.

In fact, the more that I think about our experience of taking the company public, the more I believe that the IPO should be part of every entrepreneur and business leader’s consideration set. A perception has developed that there are magical financial benchmarks that forbid some companies from listing, but we went public at a point in the evolution of our business when a lot of experts told us we couldn’t. We may have faced some headwinds others didn’t, but I’m convinced that the IPO isn’t just for folks with over $300m in revenue who’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital.

So, in keeping with our commitment to transparency about our business and some of the interesting, tough, and exciting stuff we’ve been through—long-time readers will remember my blog about almost getting acquired—I’ve decided to write about our IPO journey: What sucked, what didn’t, what shocked us, and what we learned. Along the way, I’ll share everything I can—metrics, worksheets, planning decks, and more. Not because I think we deserve a pat on the back or to celebrate what we did, but for two bigger purposes:

1. I can remember what it feels like to be an early stage entrepreneur thinking that the only path to making the company you built successful was to seek out restrictive venture funding or seek out an acquisition. I want to offer folks—whether you’re considering starting a business or have already built one with tens of millions in revenue—that there is another path to consider. While doing an IPO isn’t right for everyone, I think considering an IPO, and positioning your business to go that way if the opportunity arises, is sound strategy.
2. I believe that democratizing the IPO process will be healthier for businesses, markets, and investors. And I’m not the first: Bill Hambrecht is well known for his efforts to open IPOs to broader audiences as he did with companies like Google and Overstock.com. Tech is all about disrupting unnecessary complexity, and going public is more complex than an AWS invoice. In the mid-nineties, there were more than 8,000 publicly traded companies. By this September there were nearly 2,000 fewer companies listed, even after the boom we saw in 2020 and 2021. I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Why Listen to Us?

Hot takes on building startups and raising funding are a dime a dozen—so if you’re skeptical, I get it. What we’ll share here is partially based on the experience we had building two prior technology companies, raising multiple rounds of venture capital, and successfully selling them through acquisition. However, more uniquely: We founded and essentially bootstrapped Backblaze all the way up to our IPO (before 2021 we had only taken $3M in outside funding). Even CNBC noted that we took a unique path to market, and yet with $65 million in recurring revenue in 2020, we made a successful public offering and raised over $100M in funding to continue growing our business. We’ve made this journey ourselves, we did it recently, and—in the spirit of transparency—we’re going to share the stories behind it.

Why an IPO Should Be in Your Business Consideration Set

Why should IPO readiness (the process of setting up your business to go public) and actually going public be in your playbook? I’m going to explore this concept deeply over the course of this series, but I’ll pause here to tell you the five most compelling reasons to be IPO ready, along with a few proof points from our own experience.

• Build to Last: Starting and growing a company is hard. If you’re doing it, it’s probably because you’re passionate about solving some problems in the world. To be successful, you had to care about your vision, your product, your customers, and your team. If your company ends up acquired, the unique entity you created will vaporize. Taking your company public provides a path to building and running the company for the long-term, possibly outliving you.
• Funding With the Right Strings Attached: Raising funding in an IPO requires selling a portion of your company, just as in any venture funding. The difference, however, is that in an IPO the equity you sell is common shares—everyone gets the same shares on the same terms. In private fund raises, the company sells “preferred shares” to investors which typically come with a variety of special rights giving investors the ability to have extra control over the company, get extra equity in the company, prevent the company from raising money from other investors, and more. Raising funding in an IPO is the ultimate “clean” fundraise.
• Building a Real Business: If you’re building with an aim to be acquired, it’s nearly impossible to not establish a culture at the company where everyone is focused on “dumping” the business. By aiming for an IPO, it drives the mindset to build for sustainability. You’re more likely to create a business that can achieve profitability, scale, growth, and deliver value over the long haul. Also, going through the actual process of IPO readiness, along with the process of feeding your financials through a meat grinder of ROI modeling and outcome driven planning—both during and after the IPO—means you will position your business for even greater resilience going forward.
• Credibility: When the five Backblaze founders talked about IPOs back in the day in a tiny apartment in Palo Alto, it felt like we were trying on our dad’s pants. Sure, we knew some companies went public—but it didn’t feel like something that was really accessible (even for a room of people that scaled and sold multiple companies). But we’re not the only people who feel this way: “Public” signals a level of accomplishment and evolution that’s hard to achieve as a private company. Being able to achieve an IPO proves a business’s capacity to operate and excel under intense pressure and scrutiny. And if anyone is uncertain about how we’re doing, they can just go grab the last 10-K to see our results.
• Liquidity: This one is simple. If you’re not public, you can’t sell your stock on the open market. Once the company is public, you and your employees (and existing shareholders) can sell their shares if they so choose. It also provides the freedom and flexibility for each individual to make that decision on their own. Rather than having to sell the company (wherein usually everyone is forced to sell all their shares), this allows one person to decide to stay “all-in” and keep all their shares, another one to sell theirs, and a third to sell just a few shares.

What’s Next?

If you’re intrigued, this is really only the tip of the iceberg. In future posts, I will dig into everything from the nitty gritty tactics—like how to build a board, how to build a banking syndicate (twice), and how to write an S-1—to the bigger stories—like how years of planning can hinge on a few hours of work, or why “testing the waters” might be better named “getting thrown to the sharks”.

Rest assured: If you think you’re not interested in going public, everything I share will have as much to do with how you build a better business that you can grow over time as it will with the guts of the IPO process. I hope it’s useful, and if there’s anything you hope I’ll address or anything specific that you’d like to learn more about, let me know in the comments.

The post 5 Compelling Reasons You Should Go IPO appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Imagine a world where you can move data freely wherever you want, a world where you can use best-of-breed cloud providers to get the ideal service, optimize cost for your overall infrastructure, and build redundancy into your cloud platform—all without fear of lock-in.

In short, a world with lower egress fees.

Are lower egress fees a cure-all for the world’s problems? No, but it sure would make life easier for millions of companies. We believe in a multi-cloud world powered by low or zero egress fees. Today, we’re digging into what that means.

The Need for Multi-cloud

As companies seek to avoid vendor lock-in, get the best from different clouds, and provide redundancy for mission critical data, multi-cloud deployments are becoming more commonplace. According to Frost & Sullivan’s 2020 Global Cloud User Survey, respondents indicated growing from 43% adoption of multi-cloud in 2020 to 84% planned adoption of multi-cloud in 2022.

Multi-cloud deployments represent the future of cloud computing, and unlocking that potential means low or no egress fees.

The Case Against High Egress Fees

Cloud companies charge egress fees when customers want to move their data out of the provider’s platform. Existing diversified cloud providers such as Amazon charge egregiously high egress fees that make it expensive for customers to use multi-cloud infrastructures and therefore lock customers in to their services. These walled gardens hamper innovation and long-term growth.

The bottom line: high egress fees are a direct impediment to a multi-cloud future.

The Benefits of a Multi-cloud Future

The demand for multi-cloud infrastructure is rising and the case against high egress fees is gaining traction because a robust, multi-cloud system offers clear benefits:

• Best-of-breed providers: Specialized cloud providers are focusing on key parts of the tech stack and offering the best services. Multi-cloud deployments enable customers to pick the best parts for their environment.
• Disaster recovery: One of the biggest advantages of operating a multi-cloud environment is to achieve redundancy and plan for disaster recovery in a cloud-native deployment. If one public cloud suffers an outage, customers have mechanisms in place to direct their applications to failover to a second public cloud.
• Cost optimization: Challenger companies (Shameless plug: that’s us!) can offer better pricing through innovation and a focus on specialized use cases than the traditional diversified clouds—Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
• Freedom from vendor lock-in: Many companies initially adopted one of the existing diversified cloud providers like Amazon or Google because they were the only game in town, but later felt restricted by their closed systems. Companies like Amazon seek to lock customers in with proprietary services. Adopting a multi-cloud infrastructure with interoperable providers gives these customers more negotiating power and control over their cloud deployments.
• Unconflicted partners: Some customers find themselves in direct competition with companies like Amazon. Shifting their cloud usage to independent, unconflicted partners in a multi-cloud deployment means they don’t have to worry about how their data might be used against them, and they’re not spending money to support a direct competitor.

One Small Step in the Right Direction

After a recent Amazon announcement, we’re one small, incremental step closer to that future where egress fees don’t hold you back. Last week, they announced an expansion of their free tier for data transfer to the internet from 1GB per month to 100GB per month. Fees above the free tier will remain the same, starting at $0.09/GB for 100GB to 9.999TB of data transfer out per month.

To understand this change in action, here’s a quick example. Previously, a customer egressing 100GB per month was paying $9 per month in egress fees. Now, they’ll pay nothing, and customers egressing above 100GB per month will get a $9 per month discount. (It’s worth noting that egress begins to be discounted beyond 9.999TB per month, but you’d be paying $900/month before that discount would take effect.)

Groundbreaking, it is not. But it’s a move that indicates Amazon is bowing to industry pressure that calls their egress fees exactly what they are—exorbitant and egregious.

While it’s not going to be a payday for most customers, we still believe this is a good thing. Even a small reduction in fees could enable a customer to consider a multi-cloud solution when they hadn’t before. For example, let’s say a customer stores 1TB of data in Amazon S3, and they egress out 100GB per month. Egress used to cost them $9, now it’s free. That $9 per month savings could be used to store a backup copy of their 1TB of data (And then some!) in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, allowing them to achieve double the redundancy without changing their overall cloud spend. They get the peace of mind of knowing they’re better protected against data loss for the same cost.

Lower Egress = A Better, Multi-cloud World

At Backblaze, we’ve always believed it’s good and right to enable customers to readily use their data. Our egress fees stand at just $0.01/GB, and we’re proud to be a founding member of Cloudflare’s Bandwidth Alliance. Backblaze also waives egress fees to Fastly, Vultr, and other forward-thinking cloud companies, and we cover the cost of data migrations above 10TB through our Cloud to Cloud Migration service.

Lower egress fees support a flexible, open ecosystem on which customers are free to build multi-cloud deployments that level up their businesses. As a leading independent cloud storage platform, it’s part of our commitment to simplify the process of storing and using data. We’re just happy to see companies like Amazon starting to follow suit.

The post Why the World Needs Lower Egress Fees appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Today is a big day for Backblaze—we became a public company listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BLZE!

Before I explain what this means for us and for you, I want to give my thanks. Going public is an important milestone and one we couldn’t have accomplished without your support. Thank you.

Whether you have believed in us from the beginning and have been a customer for over a decade, or joined us yesterday; whether you entrust us to back up a single computer or to run your entire company’s infrastructure on the Backblaze Storage Cloud; whether you’ve partnered with us to bring our services to one individual or thousands of companies, whether you’re a first-time visitor to our site or you’ve been a reader all along: Thank you. We really appreciate you working with us and supporting us.

What Does Becoming a Public Company Mean for Backblaze?

It means we have more resources with IPO proceeds to increase investment in the development of our Storage Cloud platform and the B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup services that run on it.

The future is being built on independent cloud platforms, and ours has been 14 years in the making. Today, we take the next big step in being the leading independent cloud for data storage.

Additionally, while we help about 500,000 customers already, we plan to expand our sales and marketing efforts to bring Backblaze to more businesses, developers, and individuals that would benefit from easy and affordable data storage that they can trust.

Finally, we have built Backblaze with not only a focus on the products we provide, but with a deep care for what it is like to work here. With these proceeds, we plan to continue to significantly grow our team, and are looking for many more kind, smart, talented people to join us. (Is that you? We’re hiring!)

And Most Importantly, What Does It Mean for You?

My short answer is: It means more of the good things you’ve come to expect from us at Backblaze.

I want to emphasize that while we’ll be doing “more” for you, today’s events don’t mean that we’re “different” on any fundamental level. We’re still guided by the same principles and the same team. As a reminder, here’s the core of the values that we’ve been committed to since our founding (as written by Brian Wilson, Co-founder and CTO):

“At Backblaze, we want to provide a quality product for a fair price. We want to be honest and up front with our customers as to what we can and cannot do, and we want to be paid only the money honestly owed to us, and never engage in sleazy or misleading business practices where customers are misled in any way or pay for a service they do not receive. We are the ‘good guys,’ and we act like it.”

The only thing that’s changing today is we now have a more robust structure and additional funding to deliver on these values for more customers and partners.

If you’d like to share your thoughts, we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below. We’re looking forward to helping you store and use your data with astonishing ease now and for whatever comes next.

It’s Time to Blaze On!

The post Backblaze Is Now a Public Company appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Thank you all for being Backblaze customers and fans. We’re writing today’s post to let you know that effective August 16th, 2021 at 5 p.m. Pacific, the prices for the Backblaze Computer Backup service are increasing. At that time, our prices per subscription will change to:

Extension Program FAQ

Why the Change?

In short, because of a double digit growth in customer data storage, significant increases in supply chain costs, and our desire to continue investing in providing you with a great service.

Here’s a little more information:

Data Growth and Component Price Increases

Our Computer Backup service is unlimited (and we mean it). Businesses and individuals can back up as much data from their Macs and PCs as they like, and we back up external drives by default as well. This means that as our customers generate more and more data, our costs can rise while our prices remain fixed.

Over the last 14 years, we have worked diligently to keep our costs low and pass our savings on to customers. We’ve invested in deduplication, compression, and other technologies to continually optimize our storage platform and drive our costs down—savings which we pass on to our customers in the form of storing more data for the same price.

However, the average backup size stored by Computer Backup customers has spiked 15% over just the last two years. Additionally, not only have component prices not fallen at traditional rates, but recently electronic components that we rely on to provide our services have actually increased in price.

The combination of these two trends, along with our desire to continue investing in providing a great service, is driving the need to modestly increase our prices.

The Service Keeps Improving

While the cost of our Computer Backup service is increasing, you’re going to continue getting great value for your money. For example, in just the last two years (most recently with version 8.0), we have:

• Added Extended Version History, which allows customers to retain their backups for longer—up to one year or even forever.
• Increased backup speeds—faster networks and more intelligent threading means that you can back up quickly and get protected faster.
• Optimized the app to be kinder to your computer—less load on the computer means we stay out of the way while keeping you protected, leaving your resources free for whatever else you’re working on.
• Re-architected the app to reduce strain on SSDs—we’ve rewritten how the app handles copying files for backup, which reduces strain and extends the useful life of SSDs, which are common in newer computers.
• Improved data access by enhancing our mobile apps—backing up your data is one thing, but accessing them is equally important. Our mobile apps give you access to all of your backed up files on the go.
• Easing deployment options—for our business customers, installing and managing backups across all of their users’ machines is a huge job; we improved our silent installers and mass deployment tools to make their lives easier.

These are just some of the major improvements we’ve made in recent years—nearly every week we push big and small improvements to our service, upgrading our single sign-on options, optimizing inherit backup state functionality, and much more. (A lot of the investments are under-the-covers to silently make the service function more efficiently and seamlessly.)

Lock In Your Current Price With a Subscription Extension

As a way of thanking you for being a loyal Backblaze customer, we’re giving you the opportunity to lock in your existing Computer Backup pricing for one extra year beyond your current subscription period.

(Read our Extension Program FAQ to learn more.)

Thank you for being a customer. We really appreciate your trust in us and are committed to continuing to provide a service that makes it easy to get your data backed up, access it from anywhere in the world, protect it from ransomware, and to locate your computer should it be lost or stolen.

Answers to Questions You Might Have

Are Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Prices Changing?

No. While data flowing into our storage cloud is up across the board, our B2 Cloud Storage platform charges for usage by the byte, so customers pay for the amount of data that they use. Meanwhile, Computer Backup is an unlimited service, and the increase in our customers’ average storage amount plus the recent spike in rising hardware costs are contributing factors to the increase.

Will You Raise Prices Again?

We have no plans to raise prices in the future. While we expect the data stored by our customers to continue growing, we also expect that the global supply chain challenges will stabilize. We work hard to drive down the cost of storage and provide a great service at an affordable price and intend to continue doing exactly that.

Are Extended Version History Prices Changing?

No, those are not changing and will continue to be billed as per usual.

The post Subscription Changes for Computer Backup appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

After a winter of hard work within (and outside) Backblaze, we’re excited to announce that the B2 Cloud Storage platform spring release is out. We have enhanced our ransomware and security protections, added key new partners, provided performance upgrades, and more.

You’ll find a brief summary below of what’s in the new release, followed by more details if you’d like to go deeper.

New Features

There’s a lot to unpack in the new release—but our overall goal was to add the benefits you needed, while keeping things simple:

• S3 Compatible Object Lock: Offers immediate, enhanced protection against ransomware and human errors—with no additional coding needed.
• Object Lock Legal Hold: Supports indefinite file holds for compliance and retention requirements—also with no additional coding needed.
• Server-side Encryption: Expands protection of data at rest, with different options for those who do and don’t wish to take full control of encryption key management.
• Cross-Origin Resource Sharing: Enables content in B2 Cloud Storage to be seamlessly yet securely served from other websites.
• Mobile Uploads: Adds the ability to upload files directly to B2 Cloud Storage buckets via an iOS or Android device.
• Fireball Upgrades: Increases capacity and speed of our data transfer service to streamline moving from on-premises to the cloud.
• Platform Enhancements: Includes upgraded capacity and enhancements to provide scale, resilience, availability, and speed.

New and Expanded Partnerships

As a trusted, neutral storage provider, we want to enable you to use your data how you wish. As a result, we have grown a robust ecosystem of thousands of partners that empower you to do more with your data. Here are some of our newest partner highlights:

• HashiCorp Terraform: Gives developers the ability to provision and manage B2 Cloud Storage with the ease of their preferred infrastructure as code tool.
• Signiant: Provides fast and seamless file transfer services for large media and other data sets via any IP network.
• Tape Ark: Supports high volume migration of old corporate tape data to the Backblaze Storage Cloud, regardless of tape type, age, or data format.
• Cherry Servers: Delivers open cloud infrastructure and compute, including single tenant bare metal servers for high-end workloads.
• Fastly: Offers powerful edge cloud and global content delivery network (CDN) services with zero-egress fees on data pulled from B2 Cloud Storage origin store.
• Veeam: Provides off-site storage of virtual, physical, and multi-cloud infrastructures, with simple data tiering to Backblaze for additional storage with immutability.
• Facebook: Helps people transfer a copy of their photos and videos from the social media platform to secure, encrypted storage in a matter of clicks.
• Arq: (A long-time partner.) Adds native support for Object Lock protection when backing up to Backblaze B2.
• Cloudflare: (A long-time partner.) Adds support for enterprise customers to send Logpush data sets in batches to our cloud storage.

And Our Next New Thing

With the spring release, we’ve also announced we’ll introduce a Partner API later this year to enable integrated partners’ ability to provision and manage Backblaze B2 storage natively, with no need to create separate accounts for the customer. After all, we love our partners, so helping them to unlock more seamless customer experiences and data management with more astonishing ease is a natural next step. Are you a partner or prospective partner that might want to use this new API? Contact us here.

Click Down Details on Spring Release Features

Extended Ransomware and Security Protections

Object Lock

S3 Compatible Object Lock brings enhanced protection against the worst effects of ransomware (and unintended deletions) to any customer using the Backblaze S3 Compatible API, with no additional coding necessary.

Backblaze’s Veeam Ready-Object with Immutability qualification was announced in October of 2020, giving Veeam software customers the peace of mind of virtual air-gapped backups in just two clicks. Our spring release now extends object locking benefits to any customers using the S3 Compatible API protocol, with an added ability to enable Object Lock within the web UI.

Object Lock is simple to use, but hard (for bad actors) to defeat. Locked files can be read as normal, yet they cannot be deleted, encrypted, or otherwise modified during the lock period. For security purposes, not even an account admin can shorten the lock period after it’s been set.

Object Lock Legal Hold

Object Lock Legal Hold is a derivation of Object Lock that aids organizations in satisfying their data retention and/or compliance requirements by preventing designated files from being deleted or overwritten indefinitely. This can also allow for storage buckets to be set up to support organizations’ compliance rules automatically.

Similar to S3 Compatible Object Lock, the Legal Hold feature does not require additional coding for those using our S3 Compatible API. What’s unique and different here is that the immutability period is not predefined—rather, it remains in place until a person with data admin privileges removes it.

Server-side Encryption

Server-side encryption offers easy encryption at rest for those customers who seek an additional layer of protection, or need it to satisfy relevant compliance requirements and/or industry standards, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Backblaze B2 supports two modes of SSE, both using an extensively tested and widely trusted block cipher, 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), to encrypt your data at rest:

1. SSE-B2: Backblaze manages the data and the encryption keys, similar to Amazon S3’s SSE-S3 offering, for organizations that seek encryption benefits without responsibilities for key management.
2. SSE-C: Backblaze encrypts each file using a unique encryption key that the customer manages, for organizations that seek encryption benefits and wish to maintain encryption key control.

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing

S3 Compatible Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) offers S3 Compatible API users an approach for easily serving media and other content on websites directly from B2 Cloud Storage with no additional coding—so site owners can build and deliver the seamless user experiences they envision while saving their development teams hours and money by reducing maintenance costs and code complexity.

CORS use cases span a range, starting with the most basic, that many site owners will appreciate. For example, consider the scenario of wanting to serve a custom web font from your B2 Cloud Storage bucket. Most modern browsers will require a preflight check for loading the font. By configuring the CORS rules in that bucket to allow the font to be served from Backblaze B2, you will be able to use your custom font seamlessly across your domains from a single source.

Easier Ingest and Transfer

Mobile Uploads

Mobile uploads for Backblaze B2 means users of our iOS or Androidmobile app can now upload files directly from their device to their B2 Cloud Storage buckets.

For people who routinely generate or receive files on mobile, this means you’ll now be able to copy them directly to the safety of your go-to Backblaze B2 account, without delay and without needing to go through intermediary software. For media & entertainment pros who shoot raw footage on powerful smart devices like the iPhone 12 Pro, this function can ease the process of sharing and protecting data in situations when you’re away from on-set storage options.

Fear not, Android users—we love our Android devices, too, and will soon be extending mobile upload support to these devices.

Fireball Upgrades

Fireball upgrades now make it faster than ever to transfer large data sets and media libraries from on-premises storage to the Backblaze Storage Cloud. We increased capacity for the rapid ingest service from 70TB to 96TB and connectivity speed from 1 Gb/s to 10 Gb/s.

For those who have used this service before, you’ll find it is still drop-dead simple: Data is secure and encrypted during the transfer process, and you gain the benefits of the cloud without having to navigate the constraints (and sluggishness) of internet bandwidth. What’s more, we’re still happy to send you two, or three, or more Fireballs as needed—you can order whatever you need right from your Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage account.

Platform Enhancements

Building on the above, Backblaze grew storage capacity by 65% since January of 2020 to help support practically unlimited scaling among current and future customers. In line with this growth, as well as the increasing breadth of use cases B2 Cloud Storage can support, the service has also expanded API servers and carried out a range of network enhancements to provide scale, resilience, availability, and speed to enable seamless support for customers.

Try B2 Cloud Storage Today

All of the new features in the spring platform release are available today to existing and new B2 Cloud Storage customers. Get started for free and try them out for yourself.

The post Spring Forward: The B2 Cloud Storage Platform Spring Release Is Here appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

On March 1, 2008, we shared a little post with you about a project we were working on. The blog warned you about data loss, and offered the chance to request a beta code for our new product. That was our first blog post, ever. According to Google Analytics, people weren’t too interested right off the bat. But a few days later they started tuning in, and our community began to form. Since our founding, we’ve reached a few fun milestones. I thought I’d take a moment to mark them here, especially given today’s date.

14 Years

That’s right, 14 years ago today we were officially recognized by the state of Delaware as a corporation. Shortly thereafter, the five co-founders were working together, cranking away in a one-bedroom Palo Alto apartment to get Backblaze off the ground.

It has been an incredible journey since then. Early on, we moved out of that apartment into our San Mateo office, celebrated reaching 10 petabytes of data under management, and launched Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

We are so grateful to the customers who’ve entrusted us with their data over the past fourteen years. We are thankful to our team members for their dedication to Backblaze and our values. And we are very appreciative to all of the folks that have joined us here on the blog. We could not have made it this far without all 20 million of you.

Yes, we recently realized that we’ve had 20 million unique visitors to the blog since that first post back in 2008. You came for the Storage Pods, the Drive Stats, the drive farming, the stories about growing a business, and some of the other nearly 1,000 posts we’ve shared since launch.

Happily, our readership has expanded substantially over the years, with many of you commenting, sharing your own experiences, and trying out our products. It’s great that a lot of folks have found value in the content we share. It’s even cooler for those we’ve empowered to easily store and use data with our products.

There are a lot of milestones we’re proud of—passing an exabyte of data under management, restoring more than 50 billion files, or serving nearly 500,000 customers. We started Backblaze because we knew backing up was too difficult and expensive. Seeing all these growing numbers means the mission we started with all those years ago—to make storing and using data astonishingly easy—has caught on.

Celebrating 14 years by reaching 20 million readers means we get to geek out with 20 million people who care about data as much as we do! Thank you for joining us over the last 14 years, and we look forward to the journey ahead.

The post 14 Years and Counting appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.