IDrive, which is most known for its backup service, has quietly been adding more cloud computing functions to its platform over the last few years. For example, it introduced a developer-focused face recognition service in 2019 and then IDrive Compute, a VPS hosting service, the following year. IDrive e2, a new S3-compatible object storage solution that the firm claims is typically quicker and cheaper than competitors like AWS’s S3 or Backblaze’s B2, is being released today.
The startup kept its price structure simple, offering a free tier up to 10GB and charging $0.004/GB/month for everything over that. AWS’s regular S3 tier costs $0.023/GB/month, with certain long-term archive services costing as little as $0.004/GB/month or less, however the use cases are different. Backblaze, which has had a similar backup-to-cloud-services product path, costs $0.005 per GB per month and $0.01 per GB for downloads. IDrive does not charge egress costs for downloading data from their storage service, unlike most of its rivals.
The majority of e2’s functionalities are compatible with Amazon’s S3 API, while some services, such as hosting static sites on AWS, aren’t yet supported. IDrive can’t provide the same variety of services as its hyper cloud competitors, such as automated data replication and other enterprise-level features. However, the corporation does have eight data center sites in the United States and guarantees “eleven 9s of data durability” as well as a 99.9% uptime SLA.
Storage costs may be less significant to most commercial customers than having their data near to where they run their applications. IDrive’s e2 might be a cost-effective backup solution for them, but I expect the firm to focus on cost-conscious small and medium enterprises and individual developers until it can expand its cloud services beyond its present offers.
Backblaze is best known for its backup service, but it has also expanded into the rapidly increasing cloud storage sector. Backblaze opted to drastically undercut its competitor’s price when it originally introduced its B2 cloud storage service last September, despite the fact that it can’t compete with Amazon, Microsoft, or Google in terms of total feature set of its immature cloud platform. B2 has now been released from beta and is suitable for production usage. Synology, Cloudberry, OpenIO, and Cubix are among the partners that have stated that B2 will now be available as a storage option for their clients.
