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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)

#51

Post by mananaysiempre »

sokoloff wrote: post #45
mananaysiempre wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 mor…

Not what I was talking about.

Some airlines in my memory went from only having refundable tickets to having both types, and for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that.

Also, well, I don’t know what Delta does—for some airlines, the advertising term “flexible” means some sort of option to change your flight as well as one to refund the ticket, being a tier above “refundable”—but if the buyer requesting a refund is the only possible cost, we should have roughly $444 = $638 / [1 - P(refund)], whereby P(refund) = 30%, and that feels ridiculously high. Not implausibly high (I’m used to a difference of 2x or more), but high enough that I’m dubious.

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

#52

Post by sokoloff »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #51
sokoloff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mor…

Not what I was talking about. Some airlines in my memory went from only having refundable tickets to having both types, and for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that. Also, well, I don’t know what Delta does—for some airlines, the advertising term “flexible” means some sort of option to change your flight as well…

> for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that.

Was this over a long enough period where inflation reduced the value of the nominal currency and where jet fuel prices and costs of financing their fleet could have risen significantly?

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

#53

Post by cdogl »

rcxdude wrote: post #38
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…

>You think it's discrimination to ask people who use more of a service to pay more? The point is "enterprise" plans are generally much more expensive relative to the use of the service or the extra feature (the most common extra features like SSO and auditing are generally cheap to provide, both in terms of resource usage and cost to implement and support). So while they may use the service more they wind up paying p…

This is why AWS took over the world. It’s the opposite: WYSIWYG vis a vis pricing. I’m not sure why so few other developer oriented SaaS services follow their lead.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

sokoloff wrote: post #52
mananaysiempre wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not what I was talking about. Some airlines in my memory went from only having refundable tickets to having both types, and for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that. Also, well, I don’t know what Delta does—for some airlines, the advertising term “flexible” means some sort of option to change your flight as well…

> for some reason the price of the nonrefundable ones after the change ends up being about the same as the price of the (refundable) ones before that. Was this over a long enough period where inflation reduced the value of the nominal currency and where jet fuel prices and costs of financing their fleet could have risen significantly?

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by jacquesm »

foota wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> 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.

That's a fallacy right there. Your assumption should be that any service you rely on will be down once in a blue moon, and possibly for a day or even longer.

> 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.

Yes, indeed, you need to do your work and you don't get to point at others for not doing it right.

> I also don't think your definition of reliable is generally recognized, which I'd generally call durability.

Reliability, durability and availability are all industry terms and have very clear definitions. These are not the same definitions that you would use in ordinary conversation with laypeople but when we're talking shop those are definitely allowed.

> I wouldn't say the scenario above is a durability failure, but an example of the consequences of poor availability.

No, it is a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user of the service, and is a completely different issue. You engineer your service to ensure that your assumptions hold true and if you fail at doing that your service will fail. When is then only a matter of time and combination of circumstances, but fail it will.

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

#56

Post by throwaway290 »

ugjka wrote: post #50
throwaway290 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. I already said it's probably not for you. If you need lowest price per GB and don't care about anything else including your time or customer support then nothing beats a bunch of google accs with free drive tier. No price is better than zero

But for me tarsnap is convenient as extra offsite backup for valuable stuff. Price per GB is not the only factor and different people have different priorities.

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

#57

Post by jacquesm »

sokoloff wrote: post #47
idlewords wrote: post #42

Looking forward to Colin's rebuttal, "What I would do if I ran Bingo Card Generator for a while and then quit"

He already holds the best HN rebuttal of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

That one never gets old. I swear I still chuckle at it so many years later.

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

#58

Post by db48x »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #44
vasco wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

True enough, but you do get a bit more than just storage from tarsnap. S3 provides storage and an API for uploading things to it, but you can’t just back up your files to S3. You have to figure out what files have changed, compress them, encrypt them, and index them so you can retrieve them again later, etc, etc. That’s a non–trivial amount of software to write. It’d be really great if someone had already done so… Oh look, someone did!

I could imagine purchasing that software for a one–time price, running it myself, and paying AWS for storage. But then I’d have to monitor it, troubleshoot outages, maintain things, etc, etc. Or I could pay someone else to do all of that. I’m not currently a customer, but I know which I prefer.

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

#59

Post by maccard »

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.

> it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost.

Github resells a free product with a fancy UI. Stripe resells visa and mastercard by adding a 5x surcharge to card transactions. Steam resells stripe by adding a 30x markup on that (it doesn't, it uses worldpay but the point stands). Calendly resells an open calendar for $12/month.

This is a reductive argument that doesn't really show why people pay for services. Tarsnap doesn't resell S3 at a 10x markup, it sells a backup service for $0.25/GB/month.

That said,

> it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot

Yeah, and honestly it's pretty unbelieveable that there's not _two_ servers.

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

#60

Post by maccard »

jacquesm wrote: post #55
foota wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> 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. That's a fallacy right there. Your assumption should be that any service you rely on will be down once in a blue moon, and possibly for a day or even longer. > Also, parent is talking about ingestion.…

> No, it is a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user of the service,

The entire service going down for 24 hours due to a reboot is not a consequence of poor engineering on the part of the user. A production service which people rely on for critical data failing on the _textbook_ example of running a live service is poor engineering on the services part.

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