This is why I hate services that offer "unlimited" of some resource, like Dreamhost and AWS, so I will never use them. Everyone is worse off. People who use less than a ridiculous amount are paying for a few outliers using 100x more. People who use a ridiculous amount can no longer be sure whether their service will be active the next day because an employee deems their use "ridiculous".

And I don't think they're at fault like you're suggesting. Suppose I have a legitimate use case for storing 17TB of data and need to do it on a budget. During my shopping, I discover ten $1000/yr services for 20TB storage and three $100/yr services for unlimited storage. To me, the $100 services seem like scams or that they have no idea what they're doing. Amazon, Backblaze, and Dreamhost are literally giving off these vibes! Regardless, I'm on a budget so I purchase Backblaze and upload my 17TB. But in the back of my mind I'm nervous that they will shut off my service, despite the contract I entered with them to keep an "unlimited" amount of data for the price I paid. Or, if the contract says they have the right to terminate my service if they deem the amount to be too much, that would make nervous even as a normal user of the service, since the definition of "ridiculous" might be decided by some judge in a court if the service decides to cancel the contract and my company decides to sue. Would you really want a judge to decide that, or would you prefer a hard limit to be placed on the website and the contract in the first place? I truly don't understand the appeal of "unlimited" plans compared to simple hard limited, tiered plans.

> Suppose I have a legitimate use case for storing 17TB of data and need to do it on a budget.

Can you give me a theoretical example? Seems like saying, "Suppose I have a legitimate case for needing 45 trips to the buffet line."

I get your points, but I think outliers are outliers, and correspondingly they should be thinking as such. So if I had, for whatever reason, a need to store 17TB of data, I would need to be as clever about how I stored it as I obviously was clever enough to even possess 17TB.

> Can you give me a theoretical example?

I can give you a practical example. I do a lot of photography/videography in my spare time (not professional, have never been paid for it). I shoot RAW photos on a Sony A7RII. Every photo is ~85MB and I can shoot 700 photos in a day. Assuming I shoot one day every weekend, that's 3TB of data a year (that's actually a close estimate when I account for vacations and such too). Then there's video. I own a Panasonic GH5 and record on an Atomos Ninja Inferno, which outputs 4K 10-bit ProRes video at 60fps. This consumes ~1TB per hour and I tend to store it for archival purposes since it only costs ~$25 to do so for pretty much ever.

For a less extreme case, one of my old school teachers has been doing photography as a hobby for ~15 years. She's amassed ~10TB of photos over that time and currently stores them on piles of HDDs and a few spindles of DVDs scattered around her house.

And yes, I absolutely accept that I'm an outlier but any service that offers an unlimited plan is explicitly advertising itself to outliers. They're not putting themselves out there as someone with a 1TB, 2TB, 10TB or even "enough for 99.9% of people!", they're saying that they're giving storage with zero limits.

Your buffet comparison by the way isn't a good one. A buffet isn't truly unlimited, it has a time restriction, a condition that you can only eat what you take, you can't leave with it and the fact that a human being can only physically eat so much. They haven't defined a limit but there certainly is one.

There could be many reasons. In order to run simulations at my work, I request databases of input data and results of previous experiments. Each experiment is 1-100GB of xray images and dumps from other instruments. Mostly the experimenters dump the data they don't need, so often my team becomes the only possessor of the raw data. It would be convenient to have an off-site backup in case someone rm -rf's the drives.

When I was younger I worked at a recording studio. Each song consumed about 10GB, and it was convenient to return to the sources at a future date once the mix was delivered to the artist. Each artist recorded about 10 songs, and in a year we could do 50 artists.

I can't imagine what animation and video production houses go through per day. Having a backup is completely necessary for these folks. I could go on, but I feel 17TB is pretty common for businesses, so I'm not sure why you're asking the question. These days you can get 17TB for only $700.

If you are betting your business on an "unlimited" $5/mo service...

So either the guy has a legitimate business reason (in which case he's definitely chosen the wrong service (level), or he's not using it for business.

Backblaze is $59/month, right?

Those people are pushing the tech to it's limits so providers can have solutions ready for when you want to hit those numbers too.

We should be grateful these early outliers exist and break things for us in advance.

I'm grateful. I just don't think they should make a big fuss when something "currently absurd" doesn't work perfectly for them.

There is just so much wrong with your statement. You're not a comcast rep by chance are you?

Tragedy of the Commons happens without metering. Monetize all the things and give away almost nothing for free if there is an associated cost.

How is he an asshole? He was sold the service, and he used it properly, the terms of service were followed. If anything, this story shows that Backblaze sucks at providing said service.

There's the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. People know the difference. And the few people who don't know the difference don't get a free pass for ignorance.

Unlimited bandwidth, free drinks, unlimited storage, etc., are all offered with some expectation of limits, with occasional spikes in use.

But let's back up a moment. 17TB is a lot of data. If you were a professional photographer or videographer, I could possibly imagine that need. Or if you were doing some truly big data work, or some financial algo backtesting (on a really grand scale), maybe. Those people should be able to afford storage prices in line with their amount of data.

Secondly, assume you lost your local drive. How are you going to restore 17TB? Whose network (that you're taking advantage of) are you going to saturate with your restore?