Backblaze B2

Use it when

• The bill must be small and predictable: storage priced well below the hyperscalers, egress free up to three times stored volume each month.
• Data may be deleted at any time; there is no minimum storage duration, the direct contrast with Wasabi.
• The workload is backup, archive, or media serving, often with a CDN in front.
• Existing S3 tooling should work unchanged against a compatible API.

Think twice when

• Compute must sit next to the data; there is no colocated query engine or analytics ecosystem, so engines read across the network.
• Reads regularly exceed three times stored volume, where the free-egress advantage runs out.
• You need tiering or multi-region: there is deliberately one storage class, and an account is tied to a single region (Cloud Replication copies between buckets).
• Event-driven pipelines are central; notifications are webhooks only, capped at 25 rules per bucket.

How it runs

Fully managed, with eleven-nines durability from Reed-Solomon 17+3 shards spread across twenty cabinets. Object Lock covers governance and compliance WORM with legal holds. A native B2 API sits alongside the S3-compatible one, and a standing free tier covers the first 10 GB.