IPFS Backed by Decentralized Storage

    Error 1005 Ray ID: 6e577ed77a5902bc • 2022-03-02 04:47:38 UTC
    Access denied

I like the notion of having an IPFS capable store with support for pinning at a reasonable price. When I looked into this a few years ago, this was a bit of a mess. There was a half-assed s3 plugin with some severe limitations that was a bit sketchy to setup and not a whole lot else in terms of what to do, best practices, or anyone offering commercial support for this. I liked the idea but our conclusion at the time was that we'd have to build out our own storage solution to be able to use this. I walked away from this company ultimately and haven't really looked at the whole space again since. Filecoin, which people were pitching at the time seems to have largely gone silent. Is that still a thing?

So, if this is legit, I could be a potential customer for this. One of the issues I have with using s3 for personal storage is just that it is so expensive to use at scale. Basically the cost of storing what I want backed up would be the equivalent of buying a new hard disk every few months. Plus I need to baby sit and micro manage the whole setup. Both are bad things. I need something turnkey that "just works" that has a reasonable cost.

So, liking the idea.

But I have some concerns:

- I never heard of Filebase before. How long have they been around and what is their track record? Maybe a blunt question but I'd need to know before trusting something like this with my backups.

- Not to excited about the NFT and web3 stuff they seem to be pitching. Is that needed? Is this some kind of blockchain thingy or is there a serious business that works with normal money and invoices. In that case, maybe start acting more like a trust worthy SAAS company. Seriously, this stuff scares away corporate customers like nothing else.

- They mention they use the Sia storage network. It lists a price even lower than the Filebase price of 2$/TB/month but it looks like it doesn't have any commercial operations around it. What's the relationship with Filebase.

- How many people actually use this and how robust is this sia network?

- I looked at the sia github and that doesn't instill a lot of confidence. I maintain several tiny projects that managed to get more stars than siad or sia-core.

So, a few red flags here. I don't mind being an early adopter of stuff but I'd like to know what I'm getting into at least. This all looks a bit sketchy and too good to be true.

I'd recommend the founders to

- park the web3/nft stuff; this will re-assure corporate customers and be good for business.

- add a page to the website detailing a bit what this company is, where it comes from, and who is behind it. I was able to figure out from the terms of use that the company address is in Boston at least.

- if you have notable customers, maybe add some kind of logo wall. I actually suspect the answer might be no at this point.

- publish some details on the size of your network. Numbers of TB stored, usage statistics, etc.

We just need a standardized way of mapping ENS names to IPFS CIDs to serve entry point for dApps that are running completely decentrelized.

https://www.drop-dropbox.com/