S3 vs Backblaze B2

AWS S3 is the dominant object storage service. Backblaze B2 is a budget-friendly alternative at roughly 1/4 the price. S3 wins on features, global reach, and ecosystem. B2 wins decisively on cost.

The Price Advantage

Backblaze B2 costs $0.006/GB/month for storage — compared to S3 Standard's $0.023/GB/month. For 10 TB of data:

• S3: $230/month storage + egress
• B2: $60/month storage + minimal egress

The savings scale linearly. For backup, archive, and media storage, B2's pricing is compelling.

Bandwidth Alliance

Backblaze partners with Cloudflare through the Bandwidth Alliance. Data transferred from B2 to Cloudflare has zero egress fees. This creates a powerful architecture: store assets in B2, serve them through Cloudflare CDN, and pay only for B2 storage — no egress, no CDN storage.

With S3, you pay S3 egress to CloudFront, plus CloudFront distribution costs. The total is significantly more expensive.

Feature Gap

S3's features justify its premium for many workloads. Storage classes (Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier, Deep Archive) reduce costs for infrequently accessed data. Lifecycle policies automate data management. Native integration with Lambda, Athena, and EMR enables serverless data processing.

B2 offers a single storage class with S3-compatible API access. It is straightforward but lacks the automation and processing capabilities of the AWS ecosystem.

Regional Availability

S3 is available in 30+ regions globally. B2 has two data centers: US West and EU Central. For global applications with latency requirements, S3's regional breadth combined with CloudFront is necessary. For centralized storage (backups, archives, media libraries), B2's two regions are sufficient.

For system design interviews, understanding cost-optimized storage shows practical architecture. See also: storage architecture patterns and pricing optimization.