In one interpretation, it is a connective between two "claims" in a list.
In the other, it is a consequence of the response (as you interpreted).
This is worsened by the convention of putting punctuation inside quotation marks.
I'm not doubting it, just would like to understand.
$99 would give you 5-6TB of data for consumer HDD costs. And then factor in that they are likely doing some type of additional backup/RAID it would be even less data per dollar. And that's not including maintenance, rent, and employees.
Honestly I'm surprised they exist
That’s what makes it make more sense to me.
It's not even just the one drive. Data is stored across multiple drives, in multiple servers, hosted in multiple locations.
People pay the likes of Backblaze for it's reliability and them fool themselves into believing it's a dude with a HD stashed in a shelf somewhere.
Your data is scattered across multiple drives, but that doesn’t make it take up much more space. A terabyte stored in a RAID-5 array is 1.2 terabytes. Maybe the fixed price for unlimited storage part was a mistake, but the footprint overhead is relatively small. Also, keeping a year of history isn’t that much either unless you change every bit of the files multiple times. Using my BtrFS snapshots and Time Machine backups as a reference, normal data changes very little.
That's besides the point. The point is that storing data in a service such as Backblaze requires more infrastructure than just that one HD in that one server in that one location.
I was skeptical of the wave of "unlimited" (or very large) online backup/storage offerings that came out ~15 years ago, but I didn't expect it to take this long to unravel.
Look at the offering at a glance right now they are offering $99/year unlimited, versioned backup of your home storage?
That seems like peanuts compared to buying a set of drives, setting up, and managing a truly redundant & versioned backup solution takes home. I spent like $1500 on a RAID NAS a decade ago and fell behind on keeping the thing operational.
Running storage system is cheaper than you think. Look at hetzner for an upper bound on how much storage costs at scale. They offer 10 TB of storage for $31/month. It mentions having "RAID-based storage" and "backups", so this presumably includes redundancy. If you can get 4 customers paying $99/year, you're already breaking even on the server. Most people probably don't have 2.5 TB worth of stuff. Backblaze only does backups, so it isn't like dropbox where you can upload whatever you want onto it. Most people don't even have computers with 1TB storage, so you'll probably be able to fit far more than 4 customers per server. Of course, this doesn't cover salaries for your engineer or marketing people, but at least it's not like moviepass where they're selling $50 worth of movie tickets for $10.
But Backblaze is marketing itself towards people who do. The average person is not a backblaze customer
tl;dr R&D, marketing, and overhead.
Most people don’t have that much data, and capacity grows over time with new drives.
But… you need to be really disciplined to make money in a low margin business. I remember running the numbers on replicating something like backblaze in-house. It was just barely achievable, although I wasn’t crazy enough to shuck disks or build arrays.
Otherwise you're correct and it doesn't make a bit of sense.
I used to really be into all of the hardware stuff like that building 64 disk arrays and maintaining multiples for edit bays. Now, I'm so sick of it. I just want a plug-n-pray system that works out of the box and does not need maintaining. But of course I know that's not how gear works. So make it someone else's problem and throw money at that problem. $99/year sounds like an excellent bargain. apparently, too excellent
By all means be aware of the possible bias, but if you believe your short thesis enough to put money behind it, I’m more rather than less inclined to believe that you believe.
Not really. The short seller just needs enough people to believe their claims. How true or important those claims really are is only relevant to the extent it helps or hurts the narrative.
To put it another way, the incentives for an organization that benefits from a stock price going down mean you should take anything negative they say about the financial health of that stock with an enormous grain of salt. Making a bet that a stock will go down makes me think you believe the stock will go down, but only to the extent that making that bet won't actually drive the stock price down absent any other factor. A short selling firm (or people connected to a short selling firm) putting out press releases designed to drive down a particular stock price 100% don't meet that bar, unless they can demonstrate they have no financial stake in the outcome.
Shorting stock is very hard, the upwards trajectory of the market and overall optimism of American market participants works against you.
There are far far far more hype men on the long side than short.
I remember figuring it out at a bank office while trying to decide which line was the right one. While bank branch offices with lines are rare these days, the concept remains solid.
They might be right that Backblaze is doing shady accounting, but they also might benefit from the perception the company is doing shady accounting.
Those people also stand to benefit yet many people see it as fundamentally different for reasons that escape me.
I see potential bias is all.
Is there a perfect source for this information? No idea.
I don’t have an opinion on the current controversy. My issue with BackBlaze is that they haven’t been aggressive enough about raising prices to be profitable. I gladly give companies money to give me a service.
I no longer use their service. But only because I took my plex server down years ago and copied my media to my AWS Account (S3 Glacier Deep Archive).