Backblaze B2: The Pricing Appeal
Backblaze B2 is one of the more commonly cited alternatives to AWS S3, primarily on the basis of pricing. B2 storage costs approximately $0.006 per GB per month, which works out to roughly Rs.0.50 per GB per month at current rates. B2 also offers free egress when used with certain CDN partners through its Bandwidth Alliance programme.
For global businesses or developers who primarily care about cost and are comfortable with US-based infrastructure, B2 is a legitimate option. For Indian businesses, the picture changes significantly. The three problems with Backblaze B2 for Indian use are no India region, US legal jurisdiction, and latency that reflects the physical distance between Indian users and a US data centre.
The India Region Problem
Backblaze B2 operates data centres in the United States, in Sacramento and Phoenix, and in Europe, in Amsterdam. As of the time of writing, Backblaze has no India region and no publicly announced plans for one.
For Indian businesses, this means data is physically stored 13,000 to 16,000 km from Indian users. Every file request from an Indian user travels that distance and back. Typical round-trip latency from India to Backblaze's US West region is 200 to 350ms. This is acceptable for cold storage and backup use cases where files are rarely accessed. It is not acceptable for serving files to users in real time, whether that is streaming video, loading images, or delivering documents in a web application.
The Legal Jurisdiction Problem
Backblaze is a US company storing data in the US. Data stored on B2 is subject to US law, including the CLOUD Act, which allows US federal and state authorities to compel Backblaze to produce that data without going through Indian courts.
For Indian businesses with no regulatory requirements around data jurisdiction, this may not be a practical concern today. For any business in BFSI, healthtech, or govtech, or for businesses with enterprise or government customers who ask about data residency during procurement, Backblaze B2 cannot provide an India-sovereign answer.
IBEE stores data in India, operated by an Indian company under Indian law. The answer to "where is our data and under what jurisdiction?" is clean, documented, and India-sovereign.
Pricing Comparison
Backblaze B2's storage price of approximately Rs.0.57 per GB per month looks attractive compared to IBEE's Rs.1.50 per GB per month. All USD equivalents in this article use a conversion rate of Rs.94.91 per dollar as of May 2026. The comparison requires context.
Backblaze's free egress applies only when routing delivery through CDN partners in the Bandwidth Alliance, which includes Cloudflare and Fastly among others. Egress outside of these partners costs approximately $0.01 per GB, which is roughly Rs.0.95 per GB at current rates using the conversion rate of Rs.94.91 per US dollar. For Indian businesses that cannot route all delivery through a Bandwidth Alliance CDN, the effective egress cost is Rs.0.95 per GB, still lower than AWS S3 Mumbai but in the same order of magnitude as IBEE's Rs.2 per GB.
The gap in storage pricing is real. At 100 TB of stored data, the monthly storage cost on Backblaze is approximately Rs.50,000, while on IBEE it is approximately Rs.1,50,000, a difference of Rs.1,00,000 per month. Whether that gap justifies US-based storage, US legal jurisdiction, and 200 to 350ms latency for Indian users is a business decision that depends on the nature of the workload.
For cold backup and archive use cases where latency does not matter and regulatory jurisdiction is not a concern, Backblaze B2 can be a cost-effective option for Indian businesses. For active user-serving storage, the latency and jurisdiction issues outweigh the storage price advantage at any scale.
The storage price difference is real. Whether it matters depends entirely on the workload.
Reliability and SLA
Backblaze publishes a 99.9% annual uptime SLA for B2. IBEE's Tier 4 infrastructure delivers 99.995% uptime. The practical difference is approximately 8.75 hours of maximum permitted downtime per year on Backblaze versus 26 minutes on IBEE.
For backup use cases, 99.9% availability is generally acceptable. If backup storage is unavailable for a few hours, the operational impact is limited. For production workloads serving users, the reliability tier matters more directly. IBEE's Tier 4 SLA is built for production storage. Backblaze B2's SLA is appropriate for backup and archive workloads.
S3 Compatibility
Both IBEE and Backblaze B2 support the S3 API. Backblaze's S3-compatible API has historically had gaps in S3 feature coverage, notably in lifecycle policy support and certain metadata handling behaviours. IBEE implements the full S3 API, meaning any S3-compatible client, SDK, or infrastructure tool works without modification or workarounds.
Support
Backblaze provides email-based support for B2. IBEE provides 24/7 India-based support in IST. For Indian businesses that need support during Indian business hours, or during incidents that occur in the IST evening, IBEE's India-based team is a practical advantage over a US-headquartered support queue.
The Summary for Indian Businesses
Backblaze B2 is a cost-effective option for global businesses with cold storage and backup needs who are comfortable with US-based infrastructure. For Indian businesses serving Indian users with active workloads, the combination of US-only data centres, 200 to 350ms latency from India, US legal jurisdiction, and a 99.9% SLA makes B2 a poor fit for production storage and a marginal fit for archive storage.
IBEE provides India-sovereign storage, sub-5ms latency for Indian users, Tier 4 reliability, full S3 API compatibility, and pricing that is competitive within the Indian market. At Rs.1.50 per GB per month for storage and Rs.2 per GB for egress, it is significantly cheaper than AWS S3 Mumbai while providing better data residency, better latency, and a higher reliability tier than B2 for the workloads Indian businesses actually run in production.
