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We ditched Google Analytics

spideroak.com

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Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#181

Post by y4mi »

draw_down wrote: post #176
Veratyr wrote: post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

This comment is ridiculous, and so is the fact that it's at the top. This is supposed to be about Google Analytics, come on.

well, the post is from SpiderOak, so its understandable.

but its an ad hominem argument, thats for sure.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#182

Post by daveguy »

andybak wrote: post #84
digi_owl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Frankly most of what i read out of the tech world these days seems to be about pandering to developer laziness. All manner of APIs and services seem to exist in their current form simply to extract rent from developers that don't want to do back end "dirty work".

Laziness is a fine quality to have in a developer: http://threevirtues.com/

I would add wisdom to that list. Wisdom to know which modifications will allow you to be the lazy in the future and produce the best results before the user realizes they needed them. I think wisdom is a very important one.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#183

Post by nkuttler »

dataewan wrote: post #21
nateberkopec wrote: post #2

An open-source, self-hostable solution providing 80% of common Google Analytics functionality seems doable to me. Is there anything out there in this realm? If not, why not?

http://snowplowanalytics.com/ is worth considering if you have larger volumes of traffic

Why not for low volume sites?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#184

Post by Veratyr »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #180
Veratyr wrote: post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

That doesn't sound good. On the other hand, I use SpiderOak with not a lot of cloud storage use, with clients on OS X, Linux, and until this morning Windows 10. The only problem I ever had was more or less my fault - trying to register a new laptop with a previously named setup. BTW, why store photos and videos on encrypted storage? For that I use Office 365's OneDrive: everyone in my family gets a terabyte for $99/y…

I prefer to store photos and videos on encrypted storage because I want to control who sees them. Storing them on unencrypted storage means I don't have that control, the storage provider does and is kind enough to let me make suggestions.

As for OneDrive, I tried it for a while but it didn't work out. Their clients and web interface were terrible and their API was severely lacking. I expect more functionality when I'm sacrificing my privacy.

I ended up going with Google Drive in the end, as you can get 1TB for $9/month with an Apps for Work Unlimited account (I actually seem to have Unlimited under that plan, which isn't supposed to happen until 4 users). That of course means sacrificing encryption but I trust Google enough to make the privacy tradeoff in exchange for extra features (OCR, Google Photos etc.).

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#185

Post by ldehaan »

Veratyr wrote: post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

This has been my experience as well, not to mention how much the client slowed down my machine. It's been really slow going but the client is getting better. I never tried doing the encryption on my side, though, they also do diffs on each file you upload so I imagine that has something to do with the lag. I still use spideroak, they're the only company I'm aware of that encrypts locally and also has done a lot to progress personal security for all of us. So I've gotten used to the slow speeds and buggy software, it keeps getting better so that's a big plus :)

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#186

Post by marcosdumay »

efuquen wrote: post #42
eponeponepon wrote: post #29

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

I don't think it's a matter of laziness. More so where is it best to spend your expensive/valuable developer resources, on the product or some home-baked analytic's framework? I applaud SpiderOak, but they are much different from most other sites. They have privacy conscious customers to begin with, this is something that is good press for them and probably a net positive on their bottom line for doing it, not the ca…

If it's worth A/B testing your site, it's worth doing it with a tool that understands your costs and revenue structure.

GA is mostly used by people that don't need it, yet want to pretend they get actionable data out of it.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#187

Post by newscracker »

Someone1234 wrote: post #60
Veratyr wrote: post #43

Not strictly on topic so I apologise if this is unwanted but I thought I'd share my experience with SpiderOak in case anyone here was thinking of purchasing one of their plans. In February SpiderOak dropped its pricing to $12/month for 1TB of data. Having several hundred gigabytes of photos to backup I took advantage and bought a year long subscription ($129). I had access to a symmetric gigabit fibre connection so I…

Many of these types of services seem to intentionally cap upload speeds to reduce their potential storage liability (since they're likely over-selling storage to be able to offer 1 TB for $12 with the level of redundancy, staffing costs, etc, needed). I wonder if that is happening in this specific case? Although if it were the case the vendor should still be honest about it. Just saying they limit uploads to 2 Mbps i…

> Many of these types of services seem to intentionally cap upload speeds to reduce their potential storage liability (since they're likely over-selling storage to be able to offer 1 TB for $12 with the level of redundancy, staffing costs, etc, needed).

SpiderOak is definitely overselling the 1TB as well as another one that pops up once in a while called as the "unlimited" plan for $149 a year. This is clear from the disproportional pricing structure - $79 a year for 30GB that jumps to $129 a year for 1TB and then to $279 a year for 5TB - which entices users to go for the higher amounts because they appear to be great deals. What people with residential broadband connections may not realize is that a) uploading even 1TB of data will take a long time and b) SpiderOak cannot, and does not, provide any minimum guarantees on the upload or download speeds (assuming everything else in between SpiderOak and the user looks fine).

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#188

Post by mark_l_watson »

Veratyr wrote: post #184
mark_l_watson wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound good. On the other hand, I use SpiderOak with not a lot of cloud storage use, with clients on OS X, Linux, and until this morning Windows 10. The only problem I ever had was more or less my fault - trying to register a new laptop with a previously named setup. BTW, why store photos and videos on encrypted storage? For that I use Office 365's OneDrive: everyone in my family gets a terabyte for $99/y…

I prefer to store photos and videos on encrypted storage because I want to control who sees them. Storing them on unencrypted storage means I don't have that control, the storage provider does and is kind enough to let me make suggestions. As for OneDrive, I tried it for a while but it didn't work out. Their clients and web interface were terrible and their API was severely lacking. I expect more functionality when I…

I also buy extra storage from Google but I have had some problems downloading large backup files (50 GB, or so) that I have stored on Google Drive, so no system is perfect.

A little off topic, but Google really seems to be upping their consumer game lately with Google Music, Youtube Red, Google Movies + TV, etc. I am now less a user of other services like GMail and Search, but Google gets those monthly consumer app payments from me. I have the same kind of praise for Microsoft with Office 365.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#189

Post by tombrossman »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #122
Someone1234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these types of services seem to intentionally cap upload speeds to reduce their potential storage liability (since they're likely over-selling storage to be able to offer 1 TB for $12 with the level of redundancy, staffing costs, etc, needed). I wonder if that is happening in this specific case? Although if it were the case the vendor should still be honest about it. Just saying they limit uploads to 2 Mbps i…

> reduce their potential storage liability Its to reduce their maximum bandwidth capacity required. I don't see it as a problem, considering their price points. They're selling you storage, not "slam 1TB of your data into our storage system in a day". If you're looking for that, ship a hard drive to Iron Mountain. EDIT: Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3, and built an appliance for you to rent and ship bac…

> Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3...

I'm on gigabit fiber and use S3 to backup hundreds of gigs per month to S3. I've never seen them limit upload speeds, it is clearly saturating the connection for the entire duration of my upload. I would expect that because I am paying for the storage, they would be happy to let me write data to their machines as fast as I like. Is there a citation you can provide from their docs that supports your statement? Genuinely curious, because my experience has been different.

To the point that some of these sync or backup providers limit bandwidth, I have definitely experienced that. Tested SpiderOak and Dropbox and upload speed was horrid. Dropbox in particular was disappointing because they can't even claim to have the extra encryption overhead SpiderOak does, it was just shit speed every day. I'm paying a premium for gigabit fiber to the home and you really can tell who over-promises and under-delivers quickly. Fortunately my 'roll your own' backup + sync works well and is price competitive so I'll stick with that.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#190

Post by toomuchtodo »

tombrossman wrote: post #189
toomuchtodo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> reduce their potential storage liability Its to reduce their maximum bandwidth capacity required. I don't see it as a problem, considering their price points. They're selling you storage, not "slam 1TB of your data into our storage system in a day". If you're looking for that, ship a hard drive to Iron Mountain. EDIT: Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3, and built an appliance for you to rent and ship bac…

> Even AWS limits how fast you can upload to S3... I'm on gigabit fiber and use S3 to backup hundreds of gigs per month to S3. I've never seen them limit upload speeds, it is clearly saturating the connection for the entire duration of my upload. I would expect that because I am paying for the storage, they would be happy to let me write data to their machines as fast as I like. Is there a citation you can provide fr…

> I would expect that because I am paying for the storage, they would be happy to let me write data to their machines as fast as I like.

I don't understand why you'd think this. You're paying for storage, not an SLA as to how fast you can fill it.

> I'm paying a premium for gigabit fiber to the home and you really can tell who over-promises and under-delivers quickly. Fortunately my 'roll your own' backup + sync works well and is price competitive so I'll stick with that.

This is the preferred solution if a) commercial services are too slow for you and b) you're willing to spend the time to implement and manage it. It appears, based on commercial services out there, that there is no competition based on upload speeds.

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