TL;DR: Backblaze, the cloud storage company famously known for churning out HDD reliability figures every quarter, is now offering its services to the Chia community. The cryptocurrency requires lots of storage space for plotting and farming, a perfect use case (and business opportunity) it seems for Backblaze and its cloud storage platform.
Chia continues to disrupt the storage industry, even with the crypto's struggling price. It's spawned SSDs with an insane endurance of 54,000 TBW and sent sales skyrocketing for major manufacturers like Seagate and WD.
Now, Backblaze is hopping onto the Chia bandwagon with the announcement of its experimental Chia plot storage and farming service. For $5/mo, miners can get access to 1TB of space on Backblaze's B2 cloud platform, which the company says comes with cache optimizations that offer 'some advantages' over farming plots with a standard physical hard drive.
It's important to note that users would still need to create Chia initial plots/lottery tickets locally, which they can then upload to Backblaze's servers for farming. Although Backblaze says the use of its B2 cloud platform would be profitable, citing Chia Calculator and other dependencies like network space growth rate and the crypto's current price, the actual earning potential at present seems unconvincing.
As Tom's Hardware notes, the figures currently come down to ~$6/mo with 10 plots, estimated by the Chia Calculator (simplified), while the advanced version (that takes netspace growth into account) shows earnings of ~$7 over a six-month period. If Chia doesn't suddenly explode in value during this time, that amounts to spending $30 over six months to make $7. Stonks!
Nonetheless, Backblaze is targeting this service at users who've already "delved into farming and are now facing empty shelves as they seek out storage solutions for their plots." Since such users are likely going to need lots of storage, Backblaze has applied a 100TB ceiling for storage of Chia plots for every user, while those with even larger requirements can get in touch with the company's sales team.