How so? That is the same price basically for the other providers that did unlimited.
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That looks good on the face of it, however there's very little information on the company on that website, who's behind it, etc. The price seems to be set at a level which might sustain them, but the website is a bit too bare to trust my data with it (even if I have backups, it's a big time investment to move TBs of data over to a new provider).
Agree. €60 per month it is with iDrive prices about 25TB. And this amount of data for this money I consider sustainable for cloud provider. They make some margin and can make happy business long term.
As they allow unlimited and people will start dumping 100s of TB their model will collapse. Like many others. There are price points (hard disks cost for example) nobody can provide cheaper than others. Unlimited is a marketing bait, unlimited from unknown company is not worth any risk and time to even consider.
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Thank you @Turner for keeping us up-to-date!
Just had a look and I like what I see:
- EUR 60/mo for unlimited, for folks that have over ~30TB, is a good price as most other cloud storage providers are charging around ~$2/TB/mo
- EUR 20/mo setup fee for each 10TB is not unreasonable, and will help them recoup costs, even with folks "storing 100s of TBs" -- and will additionally discourage these folks from abusing the service (as 100s of TBs would also mean 200s of EUR, and paid upfront which is even more discouraging).
- They specifically mention "rclone-compatible" right on the front page! Yay! (BTW @ncw, are they sponsors yet? Perhaps they should be contacted?)
- Support both S3 and WebDAV which is also a plus IMHO.
- No traffic fee, either ingress or egress;
- Free 3-day trial (could be longer, but...)
Good point. @Turner, do you happen to have more info on that?
Also, a cursory search on their website found no AUP nor TOS. These could easily make or break a provider's usefulness and viability for us.
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Meanwhile, here's another 'solution' right in the same alley as Teledrive:
Hackaday: Unlimited Cloud Storage YouTube Style.
The cure to all our woes!!!
So @ncw, when are we going to get an rclone backend for that?
You sure about that? I'm not, because they also charge EUR 20 in advance for every 10TB they open up for you -- and that should not only help them defraying initial costs (buying HDDs, mainly) but also act as a discouragement for abuse, because no one will be able to simply "start dumping 100s of TB" there, they will first have to pay twice as many EUR as the number of TBs they want to store.
And now that I think about it, it also provides Quotaless with a very good opportunity to "just say no" to these abusers (as in, "we are already storing enough of your data, go look for someplace else for more"), without having to eff up everything for those of us storing more reasonable amounts.
IMO their business model sounds promising (depending, of course, on their TOS and AUP, which I have not seen yet). I therefore suspend judgement waiting for more data on them to become available, but if things turn out right, I may very well become a customer.
You might be right and I have too pessimistic view:) I wish them success - but I will not even try now.
New companies/ideas and business models are at the end created like this. Somebody has to try something new. Good that there are early adopters ready to burn time and money.
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I agree wholeheartedly, let's wait a bit and see what happens.
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FYI, I just opened a trial account there and created a ticket asking for the TOS and AUP. When/If I receive an answer, I will post it here.
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It's not completely beyond the realms of possibility. At €60/month they can probably afford to keep up with your habits, and if you do upload 100TB you aren't going to be abandoning it after a couple of months either.
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To store 100TB with any sensible redundancy will cost you about $2.5k for storage hardware + electricity + internet + rent + labour. Then disks and other hardware die sometimes etc. They charge $800 per year (+ one off $200 surcharge).... saying I can store 1000 TB. And happy to swallow £25k upfront cost of my storage demand. Yeah... pigs can fly.
iDrive would charge $3k per year for 100TB - so I can see that they do not BS. I pay premium vs home solution for me not being interested in dealing with all details and having off-site storage but I can reasonably believe that they won't go bust because of crazy promises. I want to store more - I have to pay more.
I still think it could be cheaper and profitable - $2k per year maybe. But there is not much competition in cheap realistically priced storage atm. Hopefully it will change as there is definitely market for it IMO.
Many storage players seem to bet on assumption that storage hardware prices will go down so it is more important to get customers first vs. to worry about profitability from year 1. Their money - their decision. But I think it is not sexy silicon valley dream business any more - it is more comparable to boring utilities provider nowadays. Then prices are not going down, electricity is going up, people use opportunity to store insane amount of data they need or not (why to exercise self control if you pay fix price?) - next we have Google, Dropbox, Box quickly becoming realistic and us enjoying this thread:)
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Can you share with us the details on that $2.5k number? I ask because I'm finding much lower numbers, using best-priced but definitely non-"enterprise" HDDs sold on Amazon, Raspberry Pi 5 as server, and raidz2 as redundancy (all of which are 'reasonable' for me but of course YMMV).
Also, my rent (at a friend's) and labour (my own) are 'free' and his electricity costs are at the lower end of the spectrum, but even so I think $2.5k/100TB/year (= ~$2.1/TB/mo) is quite a "boutique" number (eg, using first-grade enterprise HDDs and server hardware, collocating in one -- or more, for georedundancy -- first-class datacenter(s), etc) and that perhaps for those willing to compromise on some of these "best", and invest some elbow grease, a significantly lower cost is within reach.
Agreed. But the problem is that there are many more ways to go bust than just crazy promises -- so I follow the best practice (and I think you do too) of always having 2 local copies in addition to whatever "remote" (cloud or otherwise) we happen to be using.
Again agreed. But I keep thinking that it could be considerably cheaper than ~$2k/100TB/year.
Thank you for that view! I had never thought about it that way, and it makes a lot of sense -- 'start-up crazy' and all that.
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Quotaless.cloud runs on Minio services. Which means they are hosting their data somewhere and using Minio as a layover of that storage to provide rclone compatibility. I just wonder where they actually store the data.
A friend of mine bought 200TB up front. It was good at the beginning, but they use whatbox as their transit carrier, and since what box has various packages on bandwidth my friend told me the servers go down daily. He said he's lucky to get 50% of the day from the working server until it crashes.
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Are you sure about that? Never used Minio myself, but from what I can see it runs perfectly well on top of directly-connected storage, so they using Minio does not necessarily imply they are "hosting their data somewhere".
This is good data, thank you for it. @Turner seems to be having a different experience, tho -- I wonder whether it's somehow location-related (ie, EU vs US or whatever)?
I meant $2.5k up front expenditure to buy server grade equipment able to store 100TB. And I believe it can be only so cheap when you benefit from economies of scale when bulk of your cost are extra disks. Ongoing yearly cost is much less than that - of course.
Buying proper home server is actually more expensive - e.g. TrueNAS R without disks costs about $2k. Then you need disks, UPS etc.
And yes you can cut many corners and build something cheaper but still 9-10 NAS 20TB disks are not free. With such disks volumes you should use RAIDZ2 or even RAIDZ3 + you need 20% free space with ZFS. 10 x 20TB is needed to store 110TB real data in RAIDZ3. And actually enterprise NAS drives are usually cheaper - you can probably get 20TB Exos for $200. Still it is $2k just to buy disks.
Main purpose of this napkin calculation is not about home based solution but to get feeling what is real cost of company selling 100TB of online storage.
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I recently did my home storage. Everything existed but the actual storage space so I spent $279 * 2 on 2 5 bay enclosures and 8*$379 for 20TB drives so $3590 without tax for storage costs and I already had everything else as that's 120TB of usuable storage on Unraid with 2 drive failure protection and I can add another 40TB of usable storage if I decide.
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This is actually good point - Unraid is probably the best home/low maintenance solution.
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Oh shoot. That does cost something though so another $129 for that license so $3719 
My storage / Plex Server is a System76 so if you add that in, we come to about $5200 for my home setup and that doesn't include any of the UPS or networking costs, but that's seem like a fairly reasonable cost for a setup of storing 120TBs at home.
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My main point here is that somebody selling example 100TB space for $800 per year is really sponsoring me. Which is nice. But most likely means that it will end in tears sooner or later.
I do understand that things cost - but I like fair pricing. With somebody doing all work also making money. $4 per TB/year is rip off IMO. I think half of this is when it becomes acceptable and I do not feel robbed believing also that company can do business for many years..
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