UPDATE: Well, egress is cheaper. B2 is $0.005/GB storage with $0.02/GB egress. But one thing to consider is that B2 storage is located within one single datacenter.
(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated, but am in the process of deciding to use B2.)
B2 is horribly unstable, has limits left and right and most of all, the latency is horrendous.
You will be better off using any standard OpenStack provider. That way you won't have a lock in, and great performance (in my testing). E.g. OpenStack Swift on OVH.
Sure it's a tiny bit more expensive. But you get a mature cross-provider API and better performance.
Even for huge chunks of cold data, I wouldn't want to use B2.
I am uploading encrypted backups from servers to BackBlaze B2 Cloud Storage using duply/duplicity. This works pretty well for me. Latency is not important for this use case and I have not noticed any limits. There were a few upload failures initially, but I just increased the upload retries, which sufficiently remedied this problem.
That it works so well for me might be connected to the fact that their own products are backup solutions. In any case, I am now paying a significantly less monthly fee for B2 than on Amazon S3 before and the setup had a much lower complexity.
I know at least that Rackspace has a hosted Swift storage service. Of the storage integrations I've worked on, Swift was probably the most error-prone to get your integration stable, though. I guess that's just a credit to the robustness of the S3 client APIs and services that copy it (Ceph, GCS).
Thanks for Arq, it's a fantastic product. Any chance of an option to migrate from one source to another?
In the process of moving from one provider to another and it's pretty tedious getting it all in sync while I manually move from one to the other while still backing up to the previous provider until the move is complete.
It's going to be a bit of a process over the next few weeks :(
I haven't used B2 in a production setting. But I've been using it for backing up my NAS and have been quite happy. Thinking about switching my other personal machines from crashplan to backblaze.
I did some research myself to decide which storage solution to use for backups and B2 is the cheapest of all, at least for backups. I hope that Backblaze will also offer some kind of redundance option (replicate customer data in 2+ datacenters).
B2 is awesome for when you have a local backup. For example, B2 is ideal to back up a NAS. I wouldn't want to use it for set-and-forget cold storage, because of the single datacenter problem.
UPDATE: Well, egress is cheaper. B2 is $0.005/GB storage with $0.02/GB egress. But one thing to consider is that B2 storage is located within one single datacenter.
(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated, but am in the process of deciding to use B2.)