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Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

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Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#151

Post by kungito »

mgkimsal wrote: post #136
iUsedToCode wrote: post #115

Dropbox is cool and all, but i hate their pricing model. I just want to keep about 50-100 GB there (i don't hoard stuff). I don't wanna pay $10 / month for that. At backblaze i pay less than $0.5 / month. I could pay quadruple, since Dropbox is a lot better service (and quite a different one, too). But not 20 times as much. I know that Dropbox doesn't care about my tiny dollars and all. But why not let customers pay…

what bugged me about their pricing model (perhaps it's changed?) is that things people share with me count to my cap. I had a client share stuff with me via dropbox. So I signed up. I get "2 gig free!" Yay. Another client shares stuff with me. Then another. Then another. Then I'm at my 2gig cap with just other peoples' stuff. They all think it's great, because none of them are paying for it. I needed to pay money to…

How do you have "clients" and you can't afford 10$ a month to not have to think about it?

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#152

Post by dasil003 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #138
dasil003 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a global video CDN using SoftLayer a couple years ago and ended up paying around $0.01/GB.

How? https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/content-delivery... (which is linked to from http://www.softlayer.com/ ) says $0.12/GB. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ says $0.085/GB.

At the time they included 20TB of traffic per month per server, and it went into regional pools. I think they discontinued that because of us :)

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#154

Post by late2part »

StreamBright wrote: post #107
xbmcuser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and that's why it amazes me that Netflix uses Amazon a straight competitor that uses the money it makes from Netflix to compete with Amazon prime.

Netflix probably in a better position to do the math than random people on HN. I think they have done their homework and decided that it is overall cheaper to keep ___some___ of their infra on AWS.

Yes, some. But how much, really?

https://www.rapidtvnews.com/2016031942170/netflix-moves-all-... http://www.aberdeenessentials.com/techpro-essentials/how-the... https://gizmodo.com/this-box-can-hold-an-entire-netflix-1592...

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#155

Post by late2part »

shevy wrote: post #58

> While cost is always something that we consider, our > goal with our network expansion was to improve > performance, reliability, flexibility and control > for our users — which we have succeeded in doing,” > a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. Who believes this? It was, easily noticable by everyone, wanting to reduce the cost. Which is fine, everyone does so, so why not admit that it was the primary impetus? I…

I can see how you would think it is only about cost.

However, then you've had Amazon tell you "no" when you try to get more resources, and when you've had your business go offline for hours while you wait for news from Amazon, you may want more control.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#156

Post by mgkimsal »

kungito wrote: post #151
mgkimsal wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what bugged me about their pricing model (perhaps it's changed?) is that things people share with me count to my cap. I had a client share stuff with me via dropbox. So I signed up. I get "2 gig free!" Yay. Another client shares stuff with me. Then another. Then another. Then I'm at my 2gig cap with just other peoples' stuff. They all think it's great, because none of them are paying for it. I needed to pay money to…

How do you have "clients" and you can't afford 10$ a month to not have to think about it?

It was largely the principal of the thing. It's yet another $x/month, on top of other services being paid for to help service/manage those clients. Example - PM tools. I'm already paying for project management tools - put the files there, damnit. "oh, but I like dragging to my dropbox!". Oh, and someone else uses box.com, and so on.

Again, what gets my goat is partially the payment, but mostly the "it's free for them, but I end up needing to pay to accommodate their use of the service" angle. If they - other parties - were paying for it first, it would bother me less. But raving about how 'free' a tool is which I have to pay for to work with them (and they're using it precisely because it's free) bugs me.

Getting sucked in to a few more $x/month things here and there 1) dilutes where stuff is supposed to live (wrt files) and 2) just becomes a drag on finances. A handful of services can end up going from several hundred dollars in to the thousands if you don't keep tabs on things.

Maybe I'm an HN failure because saving several hundred dollars per year matters to me? I guess my skills must suck - most people can apparently rustle up $300/hr Rust/Go/Elixir project work simply by starting to formulate the idea that they're considering taking project work. I'm not that skilled.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#157

Post by audiometry »

lwf wrote: post #145
walterbell wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this change the legal/geo jurisdiction of the SSL/TLS handshake?

I'm not a lawyer, but I did work on one of the previous Transparency Reports[1]. From our most recent one: > Between July and December 2016, Dropbox did not comply with any non-US government legal process unless issued by a US court as a result of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process. ... if that helps answer what you're getting at :) [1]: https://www.dropbox.com/transparency/reports

Ironically, people are probably more worried about US Court actions these days than those of foreign governments.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#158

Post by NightlyDev »

CharlesW wrote: post #144
NightlyDev wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't know what pricing AWS has for high bandwidth customers since it's not public, I do know that the public prices are really high. The thing is, even for smaller companies it's easy to get way better deals on bandwidth. I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). I'd say that is very cheap compared to AWS pricing at $0.05/GB abo…

> I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). Would you mind sharing who that is?

I'm not allowed to say, but I think OVH also runs openstack with the "public cloud" offering, and I think bandwidth are even cheaper with them.
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