Backblaze – Recurrent WordPress Cloud Backup stored online, in your own account

What is Backblaze?
Backblaze is a data storage provider. It offers two products: Computer Backup and B2 Cloud Storage. The mature segment of B2 Cloud Storage (launched in September 2015) is an Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), targeting at software integrations (web frontend + APIs) is our focus today. It directly competes with similar services Google Cloud, Amazon S3, and Microsoft Azure.

Backblaze has won numerous awards and recognitions including #1 cloud backup service by About.com, SIIA CODiE Best Cloud Storage and Backup Solution, and Deloitte Fast 500 fastest growing technology companies. It just seems normal, that owl power - the #1 WordPress Services provider, use and promote this cloud storage option.

Backblaze is extremely useful for any WordPress owners to combine it with their WordPress Cloud Backup process. You can store each of your recurrent WordPress files backup and each of WordPress DB backup archive in your own cloud, inside your Backblaze account.

Why use Backblaze?

FREE plan

Any B2 Cloud Storage Backblaze account has 10GB storage space for FREE, when you crete an account. This cloud storage space should suffice any small to medium sized WordPress sites, for their recurrent WordPress Cloud Backup cycles. Daily Downloads is also FREE for 1 GB/day.

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Price

Price is $0.005 GB/Month for Cloud Storage space. Pricing is per GB of storage space usage. This means, that you don't have an allocated space, that will costs you monthly, either you use it 1% or 99%. You pay as you grow, and this is the best business decision you can make.

Retrieving an existent backup also costs. Price is $0.02 GB/Download. Consider it like traffic or bandwidth related costs. Deleting an existent backup will reduce storage costs.

Cost Estimation Calculator

Since, the price is in GB, each month, it a bit hard to understand the advantage. Let's take "big WordPress customer" and do an estimative calculation. Assume a database big enough to have a 1GB archive file PLUS 100 GB of files under the hood, inside WordPress. Hourly DB backups and daily full backup is an extreme approach, but let's crunch the numbers. Database: 1GB X 24 hours X 31 days = 744 GB/month. Files: 100GB X 31 days = 3100 GB/month. Both would be 3844 GB/month. Cost for 1 Month would be $19.22 just for Cloud Storage space.

Now, let's consider, that we don't need ALL the existing backups, just the last 7 from each (database and files). This means we need to delete existing archive files when we have old unwanted ones. Database: keep only last seven backups for each last 7 days (not the last 7 from last day), and delete the rest. Crunching the numbers for database: 744 GB/month - last 7GB = 737 GB/month. Same logic for files: 3100 GB/month - 700 GB = 2400 GB/month. Both would be 3137 GB/month. Price reduction from $19.22 (initial storage space cos) would be - $15.69. Cost for 1 Month would be $3.54 just for Cloud Storage space.

Now, let's consider, that somebody will crash the hosting server and erase everything, weekly. Then, you need to restore everything, weekly. If this happens to you, then consider switching immediately to owl power, as this is a borderline crazy scenario! Restoring would mean to download 5 times in a month a single database archive and a single file archive; always the last one, right before the server crash. Crunching the numbers for database: 1GB X 5 times = 5 GB/month PLUS for the files: 100 GB X 5 times = 500 GB/month would add up to a 505 GB extra Download cost. Your previous bill will jump from $3.54 with a whopping $10.10 just for Download, as extra Cost.

Total Cost for 1 Month is $13.64, at the end of this scenario. Still pretty decent, right?
* Cost Estimation is not exact and do not include the following: Free first 10 GB of storage, free 1 GB of daily downloads, or $.004/10,000 class B Transactions and $.004/1,000 Class C Transactions.