Today, Arq 5.9 was released.
Adds support for two new providers: Backblaze B2 and Wasabi.
Naturally, I asked "Who the hell are Wasabi?"... Here's the long answer by digging around online...
Answer:
The founders of Carbonite (online backup solution) have left Carbonite to start a cloud storage company. They were building the company in secret and unveiled in May of 2017.
Right now they have 1 data center and 20 employees. And they have $8.5 million in venture funding from 3 investors:
https://******************/organization/wasabi-technologies-inc#/entity
I looked at the investors hoping to see if anyone would give the impression of being able to properly judge the success chances of the company, but none of them give any "we understand cloud storage" impression, so not much to learn there:
https://******************/person/ron-skates#/entity
https://******************/person/howard-cox#/entity
https://******************/person/desh-deshpande#/entity
Beyond the $8.5, they also raised +$10.7 million recently, so that's a total of ~$20 million in their funds:
https://www.americaninno.com/boston...m-round-carbonite-founders-raises-for-wasabi/
And the CEO commented (in the link above) that he had to stop the 2nd fundraiser because they had more money than they needed (wtf?) and that he may decide to add $10 million of his own money next year (wtf?).
So at least they're very well-funded... People are throwing money at these ex-Carbonite guys...
The link above also reveals that the $8.5 million would have lasted them "to the end of the year" (may to december = 7 months)... and that they did the 2nd fundraiser just to get $1 million extra for marketing, and that they ended up with a lot more than they needed. This is all very strange!
That's a big "wtf?". So the founder only expected "a couple dozen companies" to start trials in the first few months. But they got over 600 in a few days. How on EARTH did he not foresee the massive interest in such a dirt-cheap S3-compatible cloud storage claiming to be as reliable as Amazon?! It's as if he's out of touch... Weird.
In their press releases, they're talking about being ready for "exabytes" of data, and having "0.99999999999 (eleven 9's)" reliability. I really don't know about that. This whole thing could be snake oil. Nobody knows at this point.
Their company twitter:
https://twitter.com/wasabi_cloud (really weird timeline full of random tech articles, as if they are trying to create discussion about random subjects to get seen).
CEO twitter:
https://twitter.com/Wasabi_Dave
May 2 CEO tweet: "Holy cow! We already had to stop new signups because we're concerned about running out of capacity." (
https://twitter.com/Wasabi_Dave/status/859775051251494912)
Another on May 2: "Will have more storage online in two weeks. Get in line! First come first served."
Interesting May 4 tweet: "Day 2 as the world's most cost effective cloud storage. Seems like we underestimated the demand by quite a bit. Good problem to have." (
https://twitter.com/Wasabi_Dave/status/860190321602424833)
Here is a video from someone on the team, speaking about his confidence in the Carbonite founders and that they know how to build online storage:
https://twitter.com/wasabi_cloud/status/886646400775270401
The fact that they founded Carbonite and have experience with huge data centers and cloud storage gives me some hope that this is not just a "so cheap and underpriced that it's gonna crash and burn" company.
I also hope that their hardware infrastructure is good and won't crash and burn under the load... But it seems like they're already getting customers faster than they can expand storage capacity?!
Lastly, I worry that they are just sleazily subsidizing storage costs via the fundraised money and that they are just cheap right now to get tons of customers and publicity, and that they will do a price hike later. It's inevitable that they will need to raise this price... But they'll probably still be really cheap if that happens...
Here is a brief company presentation in the words of the CEO:
https://medium.com/@wasabi_cloud/welcome-to-wasabi-hot-storage-4e06d58e377c
Here is an article which reveals some good stuff:
http://www.crn.com/news/storage/300...-market-with-disruptive-price-performance.htm
From that article, we learn that David Friend co-founded Carbonite, was its CEO for 10 years, and left it in January of 2015 to found Wasabi. Which was in stealth mode until May of 2017. That's a lot of time out of his life in "stealth mode" building this thing, which makes me think it's serious... Hmm.
And here's some super interesting quotes from that article:
So that's fascinating. They do not use stock Windows or Linux. They use something custom-written to store data. Perhaps that's how they are able to be "6x faster than Amazon S3"? Perhaps they've programmed some FPGAs to do networking and storage management. I have no idea... they are very secretive about it.
It's actually worrying that they are not using stock Windows or Linux... because that means they've most likely custom-written, and that means bugs (I'm an exceptionally skilled programmer and hell yes there are bugs in ALL software, especially while it's fresh and new).
The article also goes on to add some comments from some tech guy in the business of online storage, who is a bit skeptical about how well they'll work out:
But best of all is this article:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3194...new-cloud-service-like-low-priced-wasabi.html
Here are some of the most important quotes from it:
So from those quotes, the most important things are: It can apparently restore data very, very fast (much faster than Amazon S3). They are using some sort of RAID (multiple harddrives in parallel for data safety and speed). And they are planning a second datacenter in USA and then expansion overseas (Europe!). And anytime a new datacenter opens up, they will let customers move their data there instead (for a fee).
So, with all of that backstory out of the way... here's how Backblaze B2 and Wasabi compare against each other:
Backblaze B2:
- Storage cost per gigabyte: $0.005/GB.
- Download cost per gigabyte: $0.02/GB. But you get 1 GB of free downloads per day, which is great for doing occasional, minor file restores for free.
- There is no minimum monthly charge. You only pay for what you use.
- There is also a very minor API call cost, but it's so small that you won't notice it.
- Incredibly good storage architecture, which has fully proven its reliability. And they have recently expanded to having 2 data centers.
- The company is reliable and won't vanish or hike its prices.
- Perfect storage reliability. They're splitting data across something like 20 hard disks, and each disk is in a separate storage "pod" (cabinet), and out of those they're using 17+3 parity which means that they can lose 3 whole cabinets/3 whole disks out of the set and can still recover the data (and they recover data transparently). The whole system is incredibly well-engineered.
Wasabi:
- Storage cost per gigabyte: $0.0039/GB. (-22% of the cost of B2 storage, so about 4/5ths of the B2 cost).
- Download cost per gigabyte: $0.04/GB. (+100% of the B2 cost... 2x as expensive as B2).
- Edit: I just found out that if you store less than 1 TB (1024 GB), they'll charge you as if you had 1 TB. Meaning their minimum monthly charge is actually $3.99. So some of the comparison numbers below are wrong. But I won't re-calculate them since they're still correct when you disregard the minimum charge.
- There is no cost for API calls.
- But there is a PRETTY BIG caveat with their billing system: Every object (file chunk) you upload is pre-billed for 90 days of storage (and that amount is non-refundable even if you delete the file again immediately).
- We don't know if they'll do a big price hike soon. They are marketing themselves as an Amazon S3 API-compatible competitor to Amazon, which is ~$0.023/GB, so Wasabi has a LONG way that they can raise their $0.0039/GB and still be totally competitive against Amazon. And since they're not competing against B2 (different markets; Wasabi is S3-compatible and B2 isn't), then they may raise their price far above B2's cost. I am almost certain that Wasabi is doing an aggressive company-launch marketing campaign and are planning to get a lot of customers while living off of fundraised money, and then doing a huuuuge price hike (which at that point will still be cheaper than S3), and hoping companies and customers who needed their S3-compatibility stay on their "still cheaper than Amazon" service.
- Further proof of that theory is that they said that the $8.5 million would last them for 7 months which shows they're running a very expensive, losing operation right now...
- We don't even know if they'll stay afloat. But it does seem like they're competent enough to stay alive. And of course their goal is to make a successful company to earn them money.
Storage price comparisons for 700 GB:
- B2 Monthly Cost: 700 * 0.005 = $3.5
- Wasabi Monthly Cost: 700 * 0.0039 = $2.73.
- B2 Total Yearly: $42.
- Wasabi Total Yearly: $32.76.
- B2 Download cost (700 GB): $14.
- Wasabi Download cost (700 GB): $28.
Storage price comparisons for 1300 GB:
- B2 Monthly Cost: 1300 * 0.005 = $6.5.
- Wasabi Monthly Cost: 1300 * 0.0039 = $5.07.
- B2 Total Yearly: $78.
- Wasabi Total Yearly: $60.84.
- B2 Download cost (1300 GB): $26.
- Wasabi Download cost (1300 GB): $52.
So... on paper, for a normal home user's backup set at such small scales... there's hardly any difference in the yearly storage costs. And as for their difference in download cost, you never really need to download anything via Arq unless your hard drives and other backup systems all die, so the download cost is no huge reason to choose one over the other.
But the thing is... I am almost certain that Wasabi is going to raise their insanely low STORAGE price. $0.0039/GB is not sustainable. That's $11.7 per month to store 3000 gigabytes, which is enough to fill up a 3 TB hard drive, which costs about $83 each... So you'd need to store that data for 7 months for them to make a profit off of the cost of just the hard drive itself. Add in the costs of employees, hardware, electricity, etc, and you're looking at a lot longer time before they make a profit, if ever... Hmm...
Remember that Wasabi offers an Amazon S3 API and competes against Amazon's $0.023/GB cost. So let's say Wasabi raises the price to $0.02. That's still less than Amazon and therefore companies who need S3 API (a lot do) would stay with Wasabi, but suddenly it's 4x the cost of Backblaze B2 (which does not support S3 API).
In short: Who the hell knows what to do... Wasabi could be anything... Their founder has cloud storage experience from Carbonite and has worked in secret since January of 2015 to set up this new company. But they could die in a year or two due to the cut-throat "race to zero dollar" cloud storage market and their unsustainably low prices, or they could thrive and expand globally. They could die under the load of too many customers (see their early tweets a day after launch), or they could be super fast. They could raise the price to far beyond B2's price, and the risk of them doing that is pretty high after they've gained enough customers... Or, they could keep their $0.0039 and forever be 4/5ths the price of B2 storage...
I had signed up with a B2 trial in preparation for Arq's B2 support... and I think I'll still choose B2...
There are so many risks with Wasabi. Sure, I'd pay $60.84 ($17.16 less than B2) per year instead of $78 to store 1300 GB... but, then they'll probably raise the price and suddenly it'll be something like $90 per year for Wasabi. Do I really want the hassle of switching provider AGAIN if Wasabi, an unproven company with a "try to make a splash with low fees" launch marketing campaign, suddenly raises their prices? They're competing with S3 (and their API); NOT with B2. So they are free to raise their price much higher than B2, and it's almost inevitable that they'll do so... In fact, Wasabi could raise their current prices to far above B2's price and they
still wouldn't piss off people who come from Amazon S3's massive prices.
So, B2 is a much safer choice. For just $17 more per year, about the cost of a single pizza and coke at a restaurant, I can choose B2 instead and rest safe knowing that Backblaze B2 is a trusted company with a proven track record and a stable price. And an incredibly safe 17+3 hard disk parity storage architecture which will never lose a single byte of my data (
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architecture/).
You will all have to ask yourselves the same question. I don't know Wasabi's future. Time will tell if Wasabi is trustworthy. They may have a truly badly designed system, and they may be unsustainable and massively hike their prices as soon as they've ensnared enough customers.
I can say for sure: Switching providers sucks. It drains time and energy. I had about 1300 GB at Amazon Cloud Drive. It took about 2 weeks to upload all of that data. Then I had to just delete it all, which loses all history records... And I will now have to spend weeks doing the migration to the new provider, during which time I have no online backups... I don't know if it's worth trying Wasabi just because it's
currently 4/5th's (~80%) of the B2 storage cost (while being twice as expensive at downloads)...
I am not interested in losing time and energy to be a tester for an unproven company (Wasabi), just to save a measly $17 per year ($1.4 per month) while risking a sudden, massive price hike or a collapse of the company... Heck, I buy candy bars that cost more than that damn $1.4 price difference per month.
So I'm going to choose B2. Affordable,
completely proven as a company, and super reliable storage. Let's go!
