

WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model? - DanLar75
https://spideroak.com/blog/20110202135038-whaaaat-unlimited-storage-for-499-a-month-not-a-viable-business-model

======
latch
The argument seems to be that average online storage needs are simply growing
beyond what can be provided by a flat-fee unlimited plan.

I don't know if that's true, but there's something important the post doesn't
address: the potential declining costs of providing online storage. Might the
two not balance each other out for the foreseeable future?

I refer to this most excellent post by BackBlaze, which outlines how they do
storage: [http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-
budget-h...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-
to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/)

While we might not see many additional leaps of over 90% reduction in cloud
storage costs, I (a) wonder how much headroom such innovation bought
Backblaze, and (b) whether their main costs, hard drive, will keep pace with
user demands.

~~~
wickedchicken
I think there is a difference between 'unlimited' and 'absurdly high.' Many
hosting providers offer 'unlimited' storage but limit how fast you can upload
-- this effectively caps their storage but makes it high enough for most users
to never care. Instead of dubious 'unlimited' marketing I would prefer up-
front pricing. GMail tells you exactly how much storage it offers for free
with the idea that this is much too high for a normal user to touch. Much
easier to deal with than an 'unlimited' service that breaks down under load.

~~~
ssmoot
I've backed up a few hundred GB with Backblaze. I think the implication being
made here is unfair. I'm much more likely to believe any issues with my upload
were caused by shady AT&T QoS.

You know the kind. Goto any speedtest site and somehow you're getting exactly
12MB down, 3MB up, but it never really seems to add up that way anywhere else.
Even to my own office, which I know has an extra 100MB to burst, yet somehow
my downloads from the data-center across town are more likely to end up in the
3MB range 99% of the time.

~~~
nicpottier
The likely reason Speedtest doesn't add up is because the file you are
downloading to test with is hosted by your ISP.

Speedtest was originally made to test the 'last mile', assuming your ISP's
connections to the rest of the world is always faster than that. In most cases
that is true, but it is possible it isn't in your area.

As a particular clear example of that, here's my little write up on
Speedtest.net usage in Rwanda: <http://blog.nyaruka.com/stuff-0>

------
by
Please don't shout in uppercase in the titles. The guidelines are here:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

I realise the original article uses this title, but a little more peaceful
when posted to HN would be nice.

------
darrenkopp
I had about 50GB of backed up data with mozy for that last 3 years, growing
from ~20GB when i started. I've been paying $5 per month for almost 3 years
now, which means I have paid ~50 a year (very rough to take out transaction
fees and bandwidth fees, etc). That should buy them at least 320GB of average
sata disk drives per year (assuming all money going into storage).

This means for "unlimited" they can recoup 6x the storage i was using per year
through my fees. So the question becomes why it's not sustainable? Too large a
company and not sustainable due to employee salaries? Not economical enough
storage prices (ie using enterprise SAS disks rather than cheap SATA)? I'm
guessing since they buy large quantities of disks, they could get drives for
even cheaper than what you get on NewEgg.

This is why I believe that this model _is_ sustainable, assuming that it's
done right. Also why I switched from Mozy to Backblaze because I felt that
Mozy was gouging me by taking away their unlimited plan and replacing it with
a tiered plan.

~~~
wvenable
I'd stick with mozy, but 50GB is too small. I have about 89GB in Mozy right
now and if I could get that for the $5 per month, I wouldn't go anywhere. Mozy
is pretty slow, so backing up even more data isn't very practical. Also, their
system doesn't handle large files very well. My 89GB is just pictures,
personal movies, documents, and source code.

~~~
roel_v
Have you ever tried a restore from Mozy? I backed away from them when I did.
Apparently, there is no 'resume' functionality when restoring. That means
putting down a laptop to restore 50 gb, have a connection failure or needing
to move the computer from office to home after 30 gb, and then needing to
restart from scratch. That make me go %( - and I _still_ haven't been able to
cancel my Mozy account, after 2 months, because despite what the documentation
says there is no 'unsubscribe' link in your profile and the customer support
seems to be an email black hole.

Just venting I guess, but beware if you are trusting your data to Mozy...

------
SoftwareMaven
Given the change Mozy just instituted, my backup costs are going to go from
$4.99/month to $23.99/month. This is an intolerable jump, regardless of the
reasons they have for it. I don't expect something for nothing, but bait-and-
switch is BS.

Looks like I'm in the market for a new backup solution.

------
marcusEting
If you are a Dropbox Pro user I think you get the packrat addon, which allows
for unlimited history / undeletes. So, while the amount of files you can keep
in your DB is limited, the amount of data that DB has to keep up with for you
could get very large.

I don't see that they have anything to counter this in their model, and it
kind of worries me that if people abuse this then they will remove the feature
for all users, and I like my unlimited revisions.

~~~
DanLar75
I would say that Dropbox (being a really super company with a great product)
has issues that are actually even larger than the storage cost.

Dropbox is based on Amazon S3, which means that not only do they have storage
costs to a 3rd party that are so to speak 'out of their control' but they are
also dealing with bandwidth and transaction costs.

I wish them all the best, however I can imagine this being quite expensive for
them considering the amount of free users they have.

~~~
limmeau
As the Dropbox clients talk to Dropbox servers instead of directly to S3,
Dropbox can just transparently migrate their data to a storage facility of
their own when they decide that that has become cheaper than S3.

------
dexen
This left me wondering; wouldn't use of deduplication storage backend (like
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti>) lessen the incremental cost of servicing
each new customer?

Couldn't it be well expected that, encrypted data aside, files with same
content are often used by more than one persona?

~~~
ot
They are already doing some deduplication. From
<https://spideroak.com/whyspideroak> :

> Greatly reduce backup & sync time through comprehensive compression and
> advanced de-duplication (saving you time)

> You are only charged for the compressed de-duplicated data amount (saving
> you money)

Still it is not clear if they do cross-user deduplication, but I think it is
very unlikely because all the content is encrypted with an user-specific key,
which I think they don't have access to.

~~~
StavrosK
They don't do cross-user deduplication, yes. They only deduplicate data that
belongs to you.

------
mauiuku
I didn't read the article but wanted to comment on spideroak:

Really love their "realistic" pricing model, even cheaper with a .edu email
address.

Had a lot of problems with CPU usage, may have been the thousands of files in
my .git directories...

This leads me to support, they have been overwhelmed and it has been difficult
getting then to review my logs. they gave me multiple months free due to my
non usage but I decided to cancel when I found arq for mac.

I asked then to cancel my account and give me a years credit so I can give it
a try in the future and they credited my account for a year... pretty cool.

Wish them the best of luck!

Written from my mobi...

~~~
StavrosK
I get horrible CPU usage as well. It's to be expected, I guess, since they
have to encrypt data, but what is the encryption code written in, Python?

Also, it's slow to update things. You wouldn't expect this, given that Linux
has inotify, but it is.

Their support is rather bad, I've emailed them about legitimate bugs and high
CPU usage and SpiderOak not syncing and a whole lot of things, but they never
credited me anything. I decided to buy it for a year to back my photos up
because my disk is making weird noises and it took them _three days_ to reply
to my "PayPal won't let me pay from my balance and I don't want to add a
credit card" email, to tell me to add a credit card.

I replied "yes, I don't _want_ to add a credit card", and they haven't replied
since I sent it three days ago. With that sales support, I wonder how they
sell _any_ copies.

~~~
rarrrrrr
Apologies for the support delay. As mentioned above, we have seen overwhelming
growth lately and are training support staff to scale up right now. Feel free
to mail me directly if I can help.

For inotify, the biggest limitation we run into on Linux is that the default
system configuration limits a user to watching a relatively small number of
folders (6,000 I think, and that includes all subfolders recursively.) You can
change this in sysctl if you like, and we may add this change to future
packages. In case your curious, the SpiderOak directory watchers are tiny C
programs for each platform, and are open source.

FYI -- We've definitely seen high CPU use when syncing hundreds of thousands
of small files (source code etc), but this has been greatly improved in the
latest beta, which just went out yesterday.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

~~~
StavrosK
Thanks for replying, in the end I sent the money to _three_ PayPal accounts
consecutively before relenting and adding a card. However, your person did
contact me after I wrote the comment.

I don't know about hundreds of thousands of files, but I copied a Django app
and CPU usage has been at 100% for a few minutes now. In the end, I closed
SpiderOak and I'll turn it on when I'm done.

By the way, do you keep an entire backlog when syncing? I mean, if I use the
software for a year and then need to add another computer, will I need to
download a year's worth of changesets to get it up to speed?

------
SageRaven
Pardon the somewhat OT question, but do any of these services offer standard
protocol support so that any OS can store data? I know DropBox supports Linux,
and some services support OS X, but I haven't seen anything generic enough for
my FreeBSD workstation, though the concept of cloud storage sounds great.

Give me NFS or SMB access if you must, but I'd love to get in on this cheap
consumer cloud storage thing without resorting to lame hacks like using VMs or
emulation due to lack of native access for my platform.

~~~
rarrrrrr
FYI, the reason the big backup providers don't do "standard protocol access"
is because it's actually far more expensive to provide.

Take for example, the case of backing up a folder full of files using rsync
over ssh, vs. using the SpiderOak client.

Every time you run a backup job, rsync must examine the local folder _and_ ask
the server to examine the remote folder, so it can make conclusions about what
needs to be transferred. In short, to do a new backup (a write operations)
many reads are also required. Furthermore, those reads tend to be non-
sequential (seeking to a bunch of different inodes to stat files, etc.)

If you compare that to the SpiderOak client, it already has a near real-time
accurate database of exactly what exists on the server. There's no need to
burden the server with a bunch of disk seeks (or any actually) to assess what
needs to be done. In short, the backup operation can be accomplished by the
server using mostly sequential IO, writing only, because of this added
intelligence in the client.

Aggregated across a large population of users, this difference in usage
patterns greatly influences the hardware requirements and therefore the cost
per GB.

...and by the way SpiderOak will run on just about any platform that Python
will, with or without a GUI.

------
greyman
What is your experience with online backup solutions in general?

I tried mozy and a few others, but I always struggled with rather slow upload
speed, and ultimately found the much easier way is to buy USB harddisk, which
I hide in my workplace and just bring it home once per month to make backups.
(I store online only a few files I am actually working on, using Dropbox).

------
wickedchicken
I think this (and SpiderOak in general) is pretty instructive for a company
starting out and looking to find a way to generate revenue. I plan to roll out
a service (unrelated) later this year and will be looking at SpiderOak for a
compelling delivery/pricing model.

