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WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

spideroak.com

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Re: WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

#41

Post by rarrrrrr »

StavrosK wrote: post #36
mauiuku wrote: post #18

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 d…

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 an…

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.

Re: WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

#42

Post by rarrrrrr »

SageRaven wrote: post #16

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 withou…

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.

Re: WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

#43

Post by scottbessler »

edanm wrote: post #33
wlievens wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a decent hash of every file anyway (to check for changes etc) so it's pretty trivial to deduplicate. I don't think you'd need to do stuff like check the ID-tag.

But then my music files, which I edit the id-tags for, will show up as different than other people's when hashing. It would be interesting for Dropbox to release numbers on how many music files are identical between different people.

I believe they could (and probably do?) de-dupe at a lower than file level to handle this issue.

Re: WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

#44

Post by barrkel »

bm98 wrote: post #22
barrkel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explicit pricing is better for moderate users and worse for heavy users. "Unlimited" effectively subsidizes heavy users by overcharging moderate users. As a heavy user, I'm a fan of "unlimited".

It depends. When "Unlimited" service is sold with a Terms of Service that includes an "Excessive Use Policy" like Mozy's [1], the heavy user is operating in an ambiguous zone where continued use of the service at the advertised price is at the whim of the provider. We've seen this with unlimited data plans with the cable ISPs; they're not really unlimited. To me, it's similar to having a traditional credit card versu…

That's a separate issue - discounting the value of the service based on uncertainty over its continuance. But even within the limits of the unstated limit ("excessive use"), the heavier users are still subsidized by the light users.

You can still freeload up and until you hit the limit.

Re: WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

#45

Post by StavrosK »

rarrrrrr wrote: post #41
StavrosK wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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…

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?

Re: WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

#46

Post by wlievens »

scottbessler wrote: post #43
edanm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then my music files, which I edit the id-tags for, will show up as different than other people's when hashing. It would be interesting for Dropbox to release numbers on how many music files are identical between different people.

I believe they could (and probably do?) de-dupe at a lower than file level to handle this issue.

Good point. The ID3 tag is probably only in the header anyway. They'll just do it at a block level.
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