I have no use for this service but i definitely like your text centered websites. Right to the point, no disturbing and useless images or graphics. Thanks, that was a breath of a fresh air.<p>Also this <a href="https://radious.co/philosophy.txt" rel="nofollow">https://radious.co/philosophy.txt</a><p>I wish such design was usable outside tech community.
Recommendation: since the "rent to own model" is so built in already, also permit people to ship you THEIR drive (which they still get to own). This allows them to have a backup of existing data without the cost of upload.
This is pretty attractive to me. One thing I am wondering is, do you offer some sort of simple status panel where I can see the amount of data transfer that I have used for the month?<p>Also, another thing. I might want to use this service for storing copies of important data that I download from the net. But rather than first downloading it to my own computer and then sending it to your servers, does the account on your servers have a shell so that I can run for example wget directly on the server and is it able to connect to arbitrary remote IP or only to whitelisted IP addresses?<p>Also, your page lists IPv4 but not IPv6. Any word on IPv6?
>There is a limit to how many drives we can fit in a 4U rackmount server.<p>Anecdote: Let me introduce you to the SuperMicro 6047R-E1R36L, a 4U chassis with 36 (!) 3.5" drive bays. How, you ask? By having bays in the front and back, of course. From experience, I can tell you this baby weighs a metric fuck-ton when loaded with drives and is an absolute abomination, but it's a wonder to behold.<p><a href="https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R-E1R36L.cfm" rel="nofollow">https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6047/SSG-6047R...</a>
Exposing drives directly with no virtualization layer - is there a risk that a malicious user might somehow flash a trojan firmware onto the drive, and then later the drive is used for a different customer?<p>The classic Sprite Hard Drive mod comes to mind <a href="https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5" rel="nofollow">https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=5</a>
1. This seems very, very cheap per-TB compared to other hosted storage. Are you making any compromises here that your users should know about? How do you explain the price difference between this and, for example, a Hetzner storage box or rsync.net?<p>2. Do you intend or allow these VMs to be used as web servers or any other kind of server?
Fantastic service! I also have thought of offering this as a side project, but I'm glad to see someone else get to it first so I don't have to. Also loving the website layout. No muss no fuss.<p>One question I don't see answered: If I go the rent-to-own route, then what's the monthly price (for use of the VM and to pay the colo fees) after I've purchased the drive? $5? And is there a price cut if I want to purchase the drive outright in one payment instead of split monthly?
This is pretty neat. I am sure the comparisons to rsync.net will be made, but I see both services as unique and as covering different use cases.<p>Good luck with the beta!
> For rent-to-own drives, we purchase an 8-TB drive from Amazon<p>Last I heard, Amazon still can't ship a hard drive properly; I would recommend a source that won't put the hard drive box in a much larger box with a garnish of air pillows, so the drive can rattle around and likely end up damaged.
I might be missing something, but the whole point of zpools is to guard against disks failure; this service only gives you one drive at a time, so you are back to square one. Is it not better to provide multiple smaller disks, so that the sum goes to 8TB ?
Do you have to end the key in the remote machine to send it encrypted backups? Can you merge in incremental sends without decrypting the backup on the remote machine?
Neat idea. A couple of questions:<p>Does the nominal bandwidth cost of $5 for 1 TB mean it's $5 each month for a TB per month? Or is it simply "every 1TB transferred adds $5", no matter how long it took to use that much?<p>For the rent to own plan, the only thing you're paying after payoff is the bandwidth fee? (Which for minimal usage might be under $5 or $5 depending on the above answer) Is that right?
Despite the ZFS in the service name, there doesn't seem to be any actual ties/restrictions to ZFS, as far as I can see?<p>It looks like you just rent a VM from them that has a dedicated hard drive attached to it. How you choose to format that drive would seem to be an implementation detail that can be left to the user. If so, it seems odd to limit your potential customers to people who use ZFS?
This seems to expose a common misconception among ZFS people (and one I previously erroneously harbored) that an SLOG device is useful on a remote machine (that you are not connected to via nfs).<p>It is not. It is useful for synchronous writes only, such as those done by a local database server, or remotely via NFS. If you’re just sshing in to send data, an SLOG device is a waste.
Dumb question: if all you plan for the users to do is send ZFS snapshots (as a backup-service or whatever), isnt 12GBs of RAM per host quite excessive?<p>Wouldn’t you be able to implement this cheaper using only 4-8GBs?
Nice service. Seems a lot more trustful than a web giant.<p>Would there be an equivalent for long term backup using a technology like tape storage? An alternative to S3 Glacier Deep Archive basically.
What's a cheap option for a ZFS based NAS systme at home?<p>QNAP is now offering ZFS based systems but they are rather pricey. Is it just BYO? How can i make one that is super power efficient?
Will you actually make money from this?<p>It seems like you might have added up your costs, but not left any room to pay for your hours, unused capacity, unpaid bills, overheads, profit, etc.
> Due to current export restrictions, we cannot ship to international users :/<p>What restrictions are those? You even say people can use a forwarding service, if that were the case, wouldn't the forwarding service be illegal too?
The bandwidth is what kills this for me. I actually have a use-case for something like this. I'm re-partitioning my ZFS array, adding some space, and need to host all of the data for a few months while I get it all setup and tested, but the bandwidth cost at $5/TB is prohibitive.<p>What's the best place to do this? I'm using google drive, but they throttle your upload quite significantly. I can see right now I'm getting about ~150kB/sec even though I have a 1GB upload speed.
Love the idea, will consider it and hope it works out for you. Two things:<p>* What does the 20 mbps / 1gbps capacity indicate? How is this former number derived?<p>* I suspect Debian would make more sense than Ubuntu 20.04 for your target audience. At least that's my personal strong preference.
You probably could use something like hdparm to power off
unused drives and save power/watts/data center bill when they are not being used to send receive ZFS snapshots.<p>hd-idle and hdparm -Y
alt hdparm -S 600 /dev/sdx
$5/TB with only a guarantee of 100mbps is kind of unacceptable no? I definitely think you would have benefited from finding a cheaper datacenter, or moving your profit margins elsewhere.<p>Honestly seems really interesting sans that tidbit, would be interesting to have unlimited 100mbps but gigabit at $5/TB or something like that. But $40 just to fill the drive is a bit much, and with being hard disk with only 4GB of RAM I'd think backups are what this is targeting, and not something with a lot of activity.<p>Looks like a hobby project so it's no big deal, just giving my opinion.
Why don't you span a ceph cluster across your servers and combine all these 8 TB drives into one big pool. Then you could sell it as cloud storage with freely configurable storage sizes.
I've been looking for an off-site cloud storage provider that takes encrypted zfs sends, so I believe I'm in the target market for this. My use case is a home storage server with a zpool of several hundred terabytes.<p>However, there are some product compromises that would preclude me from using this. First, I already manage drive purchases, parity, dealing with scrubs and errors, etc. for my pool. I don't want to duplicate my effort for a second backup pool. ZFS sends are, ultimately just a long binary, and I simply want them stored, without much hassle. If I'm planning a zpool expansion, the work in using this service is now doubled, having to (non-trivially) determine the best pool geometry for my own pool, and for a backup pool made up of differently sized drives.<p>I also don't understand why someone would want to give you their encryption passphrase. A service like this should just take encrypted sends, and send them back when requested. I don't want my plaintext anywhere other than my own hardware.<p>That said, your main competitor suffers from all of these problems as well.
You lose a key feature of ZFS, which is scrubbing. This feature requires multiple drives in a zpool, while you only provides one. Scrubbing generally happens once a month to prevent double or triple bit flips in the same location, however you might get bit rot with your service.
what are uses of this? if I want to back up linux I can now via <a href="https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-does-Backblaze-support-Linux-Users-" rel="nofollow">https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d...</a> . This option seems more expensive per month. In the future I could even see backblaze offering something similar to this since they are a zfs shop anyways