Thanks for your reply. I can certainly investigate that route, but the kinds of ISPs that implement these caps aren't exactly known for their magnanimity to begin with, so I'm not optimistic. Assuming they don't, I would get charged about $10 / 50GB overage, which would work out to 3000 / 50 = $60, which is the yearly cost of your service. So my dilemma is that I'm either paying for about half a year before I get a complete backup set with BB, or I'm effectively paying double the service price just to make sure the data all gets to you guys in a timely manner. For that price, I could just as well just shell out the extra dough to stay with an upgraded Crashplan Small Business account.
I hope you guys will reconsider or re-examine your position on seeded backups. I don't think I am being unreasonable in wanting that to be an option, nor do I think I'm alone in having somewhere north of a terabyte of media--any amateur photographer or video editor probably has a similarly-sized dataset. If unlimited bandwidth were available, this wouldn't be a concern, but, I don't have the luxury of being able to choose a different ISP. And with Chairman Verizon heading the FCC, I don't see that changing any time soon.
And yea, I'm personally hoping that the ISP situation gets a bit more friendly towards consumers!
Solving the first is definitely within Backblaze's capability if they are prepared to make an exception.
You forgot to multiply by $10, so you're actually looking at $600 for 3 TB of overage
Also, at the beginning the "no seeding" thing was kind of a gate to folks who had a lot of data but limited bandwidth. Our theory was that you should never be afraid of uploading your data, you should have the bandwidth to match. That was bout 10 years ago though, so things have changed - but it's still not a priority project for us - especially considering that since Online Backup is a flat-fee, by definition almost anyone that would use the "seeding" feature would not be a break-even customer for us.
This would be my sales pitch to your superiors:
1) My 4TB is not really expected to grow much beyond this point. It's the accumulation of a lifetime of hoarding, and the year-to-year addition beyond that will be in gigs, not TBs. So after the first year, it's basically just cold storage. If you guys can profitably store 4TB in cold storage for $50/yr, it should be profitable after the first year.
2) The guys who have enough media and are technical enough to want to seed it are also more than likely going to be the guys who make the backup service recommendations for their friends and families.
Case in point: http://nothingofvalue.org/backup.html
That's the website I created for friends, family, and coworkers to read, because I got tired of explaining the same stuff to them every Christmas. I very nearly bought the Crashplan Family plan at one point just to make it easier for them--I'm not glad I didn't. But I guess my point here is that the power-users, as irritating as we are, are going to be the ones who spread your product by word of mouth.
3) People with lots of data who take backing up seriously generally don't like switching vendors unless we have no other choice. I don't want a provider that I feel like I'll "outgrow" when I get too much data and be forced to switch to a more expensive plan or to another vendor. So while a user with 100 GB or less might be with you guys for a year, he will probably move to another vendor if they can do it cheaper, since he doesn't have much data. The hoarders, on the other hand, just want to know you'll keep their stuff safe and won't jack up the price on them at some point, and will otherwise be willing to stick with you forever.
Just my $0.02 as a potential customer.