Remember Backblaze - the hosting company that releases regular reports on HDD and SSD reliability deployed on their data servers? Well, the company seems to have found an unexplored market niche between pent up demand for HDD storage and the consumer channel's inability to provide enough hardware for would-be Chia farmers and general consumers who just want to back up their family photos. Unlike some cloud storage providers, who have updated their terms of service so as to exclude usage of their infrastructure to either plot/farm Chia, Backblaze now offers a monthly subscription which, for $5 a month, allows users to store up to 1 TB of plots, while also enabling them to be farmed.

Users will still have to plot their "lottery tickets" on their local computer (and/or acquire them through a number of services which have started offering the ability to download ready-made plots), and then upload them to Backblaze's servers for farming. The Chia Calculator places winnings from 1 TB of plots at around $6.43 per month (considering the current Chia price and overall network space - that does amount to quite meager winnings of $1.43 per month, and doesn't take into account Chia network's space growth, which currently stands at ~20 EiB. Users wanting to make use of this service will have a 100 TB limit on uploaded plots.