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What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

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Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#41

Post by jacquesm »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #14

I've read this before, and I still think it is pretty remarkable for its clarity and the amount of useful, actionable judgement that it contains. A question: The article is from 2014. So almost a decade has passed. How, if at all, would it be different if it was written today?

That's an interesting question because Patrick has gained a ton of experience since then, selling BCC, then doing Appointment Reminder, Starfighter and quite a few years of working for Stripe. Surely that would have resulted in additional insights. He's still active here so maybe he'll chime in.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#43

Post by idlewords »

peteforde wrote: post #5

It's interesting to note that Colin - who apparently explicitly asked for this feedback from a close friend who happens to be an eminent domain expert - appears to have taken basically none of Patrick's advice in a decade. I don't know the inside baseball, but if I was @patio11, I'd be more than annoyed by this. I might ratchet up to lightly insulted, given how master-of-the-obvious some of the advice is.

Patio11 is a professional advice giver, while cperciva makes a living running a niche service. The ability to give eloquent and persuasive advice is professionally valuable to the giver, but should not be mistaken for domain expertise. It's important when running a business to lash yourself to the mast sometimes and not listen to people without direct experience or skin in the game.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#44

Post by CodesInChaos »

vasco wrote: post #29
shubhamjain wrote: post #10

I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notion that every software company needs to optimize for the same things. Tarsnap is a service that I am sure makes comfortable amount of money for its founder and has remained faithful to its initial audience. Why does anything other than that matters? Yes, some t…

> It does one thing and does it well From the posts I've read recently it seems like it does one thing and it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot, and it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost. It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.

> at 10x the cost

And that's comparing to S3 Standard. Infrequent Access is 2x cheaper than that, and Glacier Instant Retrieval 6x (if your files aren't tiny).

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#45

Post by sokoloff »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #40
edanm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So that kind of thinking is why every second thing I’d like to hobby-use is priced as a free trial with one missing crucial feature, then $300/mo. You seem to be under the impression that if people didn't charge so much money, you'd have stuff cheaper. That's not true - what would actually happen is you'd just have less stuff, because people wouldn't build them in the first place. If someone can afford to create so…

>> That’s basically the definition of a discriminating monopolist and what gets you airline-style inscrutable pricing and the SSO tax, isn’t it? > You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? Terminology confusion. In microeconomics, a “discriminating monopolist” is one who engages in “price discrimination”, that is to say providing the same service to everybody but charging each…

> an airline or railway that on transitioning from all refundable tickets to a split of non-refundable and refundable tickets ended up making non-refundable tickets measurably cheaper (in the long run)

I don’t know how long is the long run for you, but Delta is right now offering RT to Vegas for $444 non-refundable and $638 refundable. I didn’t go check all the other carriers, but I definitely recall tickets with more flexibility (sometimes including refundable, other times creditable) being sold at higher prices than less flexible tickets.

As a buyer that makes sense to me; it costs money to provide flexibility; it’s worth it to some buyers but not all, so buyers can opt into the level of flexibility that matches their preferences.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#48

Post by throwaway290 »

ugjka wrote: post #25
throwaway290 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need free space to store something this is so not for you buddy... Just go register 10 google accounts to spread your stuff around and you never need to pay for storage;) some people like to be a customer not a product

my point it is overpriced no matter how you look at it

No, it's overpriced if you compare it to worse solutions which is how the market is supposed to work

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#49

Post by foota »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
Kwpolska wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability is important for a backup service. If your machine explodes and you need to restore from backups, but the backup service is down, you need to wait and may lose money due to the outage (SLA, unhappy customers, no ability to onboard new customers etc.). If you’re doing weekly backups, but the backup service was down during the backup slot, and your crontab setup doesn’t yell at you and doesn’t retry until i…

Yes, reliability is important. And by that measure Tarsnap is 100% reliable. But not 100% available , and that's something that often gets confused. Having to wait while you are trying to restore a backup would be extremely annoying but that implies that you've done something wrong in your planning: if you expect your backup service to be 100% available then you are probably not engineering things right because for m…

I think it's very hard to run a service by yourself of this magnitude reliably, but I'd always take a 99.9% availability daily backup service that runs right at SLO over one that's down for a day once in a blue moon.

Also, parent is talking about ingestion. If your backups aren't configured well and the backup process fails, then your backup may not end up durable.

I also don't think your definition of reliable is generally recognized, which I'd generally call durability. I wouldn't say the scenario above is a durability failure, but an example of the consequences of poor availability.

Re: What I would do if I ran Tarsnap (2014)

#50

Post by ugjka »

throwaway290 wrote: post #48
ugjka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my point it is overpriced no matter how you look at it

No, it's overpriced if you compare it to worse solutions which is how the market is supposed to work

So I should pay 125€/mo(plus transfer fees) instead of 6€/mo for my 500GB?
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