Backblaze B2 Storage Regions in 2026: Which One Should You Actually Pick?

You’ve got a few terabytes of backups, photos, or app data. You’ve heard Backblaze B2 is the cheap option, roughly a quarter of what AWS S3 charges. Then you hit a dropdown asking you to pick a storage region, and suddenly you’re wondering if this choice actually matters or if it’s just cosmetic.

Short answer: it matters. Maybe not enough to lose sleep over, but enough that picking wrong can cost you latency, egress headaches, or a compliance problem you didn’t see coming.

I’ve run workloads on B2 since 2021, moved data between regions, and dealt with the fallout of a bad region choice firsthand. Here’s everything I wish someone had told me before I clicked that dropdown.

Key Takeaways

Backblaze currently offers two B2 regions: US West (Sacramento) and EU Central (Amsterdam)
Storage pricing is identical in both regions: $6/TB/month as of 2026
You cannot change a bucket’s region after creation. You’d need to create a new bucket and re-upload
Pick the region closest to you or your users for lower latency, or pick based on data residency rules (GDPR, etc.)
Egress is free up to 3x your average stored data per month, in both regions
If you’re still deciding on cloud storage overall, we’ve compared B2 against S3, Wasabi, and others over at BriskPick if you want the broader picture

What Are Backblaze B2 Storage Regions, Exactly?

A region is the physical location (or locations) where Backblaze keeps the drives holding your data. When you create a bucket, you assign it to one region. All the files in that bucket live there.

Backblaze doesn’t spread your bucket across the globe. If you pick US West, your data sits in Sacramento, California. Pick EU Central, and it lives in Amsterdam. That’s it. Two options, which honestly feels limited compared to AWS’s 30-plus regions.

But that simplicity is part of why B2 is cheap.

The Two Regions Available in 2026

Region	Location	Region Code	Pricing
US West	Sacramento, California	us-west-004, us-west-005	$6/TB/month
EU Central	Amsterdam, Netherlands	eu-central-003, eu-central-002	$6/TB/month

Same price. Same feature set. Same free egress allowance. The only real differences are geography and legal jurisdiction.

Why Your Region Choice Actually Matters

1. Latency

This is the big one for most people. If your servers are in Virginia and your bucket is in Amsterdam, every request crosses the Atlantic. That’s roughly 80-90ms of round-trip overhead per API call.

For a nightly backup job? Irrelevant. Nobody cares if a backup takes 30 seconds longer.

For a media serving workload or an app that reads from B2 on every user request? It adds up fast. I once hosted a client’s image library in EU Central while their app servers ran in Oregon. Page loads dragged. Moving the bucket to US West shaved noticeable time off image delivery, with zero code changes.

Rule of thumb: put the bucket near whatever reads from it most.

2. Data Residency and Compliance

If you’re in the EU and storing personal data covered by GDPR, keeping it inside the EU matters legally. EU Central (Amsterdam) exists largely for this reason. Same logic applies in reverse: some US companies have contracts requiring data stay on US soil.

There’s no gray area here. The data physically lives where you put it. Pick accordingly.

3. You Can’t Change It Later (Easily)

This tripped me up early on. Backblaze does not let you migrate a bucket between regions. Your options are:

Create a new bucket in the other region
Re-upload everything
Delete the old bucket

That’s fine for 100GB. For 10TB, you’re looking at days of uploads, weeks of egress-free transfer within B2 (more on that below), or paying Backblaze’s migration service. To be frank, I’d rather not deal with it at all, so pick carefully the first time.

4. Transfer Speeds In and Out

Both regions have solid bandwidth. In my tests from the US East Coast, I pull around 400-600 Mbps from US West. From Amsterdam, the same connection drops to around 100-150 Mbps. From a EU-based server, it’s the mirror image.

Upload speed follows the same pattern. If you’re seeding terabytes of data, the region distance directly affects how long that takes.

Backblaze B2 Pricing: Does Region Affect Cost?

No. And this is one of B2’s genuinely nice traits. Unlike AWS, where regional pricing varies wildly (S3 in Mumbai costs differently than S3 in Oregon), Backblaze charges the same flat rate everywhere:

Storage: $6/TB/month ($0.006/GB)
Downloads: $0.01/GB after your free allowance
Free egress: up to 3x your average data stored per month
API calls: $0.004 per 10,000 Class B (read) calls, roughly

The free egress allowance is the sleeper feature. If you store 1TB on average, you get 3TB of downloads free every month. For a personal archive or small business backup, most people never pay a cent in egress. AWS can’t touch that.

One honest annoyance: Backblaze bills in terabytes, not gibibytes, and their rounding means my invoice is always a couple cents higher than my mental math predicts. Minor, but worth knowing.

US West vs EU Central: How to Decide

Here’s the decision process I use, in order:

Compliance requirements first. GDPR or EU data residency rules? You’re on EU Central, full stop. US-only contract requirements? US West.
Where’s your compute? Bucket goes where your servers are. App on Hetzner in Germany? EU Central. AWS us-east-1? US West.
Where are your users? For serving files directly to people, pick the region closer to your audience.
Still tied? Default to US West. It’s Backblaze’s home turf, gets their newest hardware first, and historically has had more capacity headroom.

That last point is subjective and possibly superstition on my part. But in my experience, new B2 features (like their Event Notifications rollout) landed in US West buckets first. Treat it as a soft tiebreaker, not gospel.

Real-World Performance: My Tests

I ran the same set of operations against buckets in both regions from three different locations. Nothing scientific, just honest numbers from a home fiber connection and a couple of VPS instances.

From Portland, Oregon:

US West first-byte latency: ~35ms
EU Central first-byte latency: ~140ms
Sustained download from US West: ~500 Mbps
Sustained download from EU Central: ~130 Mbps

From Frankfurt, Germany:

EU Central first-byte latency: ~15ms
US West first-byte latency: ~150ms
Sustained upload to EU Central: ~600 Mbps
Sustained upload to US West: ~120 Mbps

The pattern is obvious. Distance is destiny. B2’s raw throughput is excellent in both regions once you’re connected; it’s the physics of distance you’re fighting.

One thing that surprised me: B2’s reliability has been rock solid in both regions across five years. I’ve never had an outage affect my backups. Their status page shows occasional incidents, but nothing that touched my data.

How to Choose Your Region When Creating a Bucket

If you’ve never done this, here’s the actual process:

Log in to your Backblaze account and open the B2 Cloud Storage section
Click Create a Bucket
Enter a bucket name (must be globally unique)
Select your region from the dropdown: this is the moment that matters
Choose public or private (go private unless you have a specific reason)
Optionally enable Object Lock for immutable backups
Click Create, and generate an application key for API access

That dropdown in step 4 is the only chance you get. Double-check it before you commit.

Common Mistakes People Make with B2 Regions

I’ve made most of these myself:

Picking a region for the wrong reason. People assume one region is faster or cheaper overall. Neither is true. It’s purely about proximity and jurisdiction.
Ignoring where their restore target is. If your disaster recovery plan involves restoring to an office in Chicago, an Amsterdam bucket makes restores painfully slow.
Mixing regions unnecessarily. Some folks create buckets in both regions “for redundancy.” That’s not how redundancy works at B2. Both regions already store your data redundantly across multiple drives and servers. Cross-region replication exists, but it’s extra cost and complexity most people don’t need.
Forgetting application keys are region-agnostic. Your master application key works across buckets in both regions. Fine, but it means one leaked key exposes everything. Use per-bucket keys.

Backblaze B2 vs S3 on Regions

Worth a quick comparison since most people evaluating B2 are comparing it to S3.

AWS gives you dozens of regions. That’s genuinely better for global applications. But you pay for that flexibility: S3 Standard starts around $23/TB/month, nearly 4x B2’s price, and egress fees will ruin your month if you serve a lot of data.

For cold storage, backups, and media archives, B2’s two regions cover the vast majority of real needs. You either need data in the US or in Europe. If you need data in Singapore or São Paulo, B2 isn’t your tool, and that’s okay. Know your requirements before committing.

For anyone deep in that comparison, our cloud storage matchups on BriskPick break down the pricing math with real workload examples.

Who Should Use Which Region: My Quick Recommendations

Pick US West if:

You’re in the Americas or Oceania
Your servers run on US cloud providers
You have no compliance constraints pointing elsewhere

Pick EU Central if:

You’re in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa
GDPR or local rules require EU data residency
Your infrastructure lives at EU providers like Hetzner or OVH

Skip B2 entirely if:

You need Asia-Pacific or South American data residency
You need sub-20ms latency for a truly global user base (look at a CDN in front of B2 instead)

FAQ: Backblaze B2 Storage Regions

Can I change my bucket’s region after creating it?

No. Backblaze doesn’t support region migration. You create a new bucket in the target region and copy your data over. Backblaze has a data transfer service for large migrations if re-uploading isn’t practical.

Is Backblaze B2 cheaper in one region than the other?

No. Both regions cost exactly $6/TB/month, with identical download and API pricing. Region has zero effect on your bill.

Does Backblaze automatically replicate my data across regions?

No. Your data is redundantly stored within your chosen region, but it stays there. If you want copies in both regions, Backblaze supports cross-region replication rules, but it doubles your storage cost.

Will Backblaze add more regions in the future?

They’ve hinted at expansion for years, but as of 2026, US West and EU Central are what we’ve got. Don’t bank on a region that doesn’t exist yet.

Which region should I pick for a personal backup archive?

Whichever is closer to you. For backups, latency barely matters, so just minimize upload time. If you’re in Europe, EU Central. Otherwise, US West.

Our Verdict

Backblaze B2’s region system is simple to a fault. Two regions, same price, no surprises. That’s a strength for backups and archives, where B2 shines, and a limitation for globally distributed apps.

My advice: choose based on compliance first, then proximity to your servers or users. Get it right the first time, because changing later is a chore. And if your workload is backup-focused with modest egress, B2 at $6/TB is still one of the best deals in cloud storage, period.

Ready to set up your bucket? Check Backblaze B2 pricing here and pick your region with confidence.