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Show HN: CloudBuddy – Pay less for online storage

cloudbuddy.cloud

11 pointsCloudBuddy28 comments

Hosted on a Comcast cable business account?

That's not reassuring as far as availability goes.

Updated: No info on the company, domain registration is private, registered agent for the corporation is one of those "registered agent services" that lets the owner(s) hide their identity, and the physical address listed (edit: on their contact page) is a post office.

Yeah, pretty sure I'm not uploading any files to you. Nice try, though; you get points for the attempt.

The company address is on the https://cloudbuddy.cloud/cgi-bin/contact-us_p1.pl page (edit: oh, if it's a post office indeed my argument doesn't count). I agree, there should be (many) other assurances and trust signals.

Yeah, it's a box at the post office ("Unit 184" is "PO Box 184"). I'd wager the phone number is a (so-called) "virtual phone number" as well.

It could be a totally legit business but there's a bit too much "secrecy" for me to trust them.

The phone number is a virtual one, your right. Being a legit business is solely in the eyes of the user/customer and that is why we automatically give the first 30 days free for all new users. The only personal info you have to give us to get this free account is your email address. That's it. If you want you can encrypt everything prior to storing it on our servers. If CloudBuddy does not meet your expectations within 30 days, you've lost nothing as there is no further action required of you. The account will be automatically deleted on the 37th day if you don't delete it sooner (which you can do at anytime).

I'm sorry if in my earlier comments I sounded overly critical or like I'm "shitting on you" or something. I'm really not trying to. Please don't take the following personally -- maybe consider it "constructive criticism" -- but here is some honest insight from a potential customer:

---

With your service, you are clearly targetting a specific type of user and I am fit, almost exactly, (what I think is) your target audience. I'm the type of person who would be interested in using your basic, no-frills service and wouldn't need any help whatsoever doing so. You wouldn't be getting any support e-mails from me with questions like "What's an SFTP client?", "How do I download my files with Microsoft Foxfire?", and such. The time you spend answering one question like that for a user is going to eat up any profits you might have made from them.

So, your target user is advanced and technical. They will look at aspects of the business that the "average user" (I hate that term) won't care or even think about: Where is your service hosted? What's your upstream connectivity like? Where are your graphs showing your history availability? What's your backup/restore procedures and timelines (I accidentally deleted a file from your server and need it restored ASAP!)? Public SSH/SFTP servers are targeted all the time for attack. What have you done to harden/lock down your public-facing servers (if it's less than I've done to my own, you seem incompetent)?

When I noticed very little information on your web site, I started looking elsewhere for it. I found out that the company is less than a year old, the registered agent is "hidden", your "physical address" is a post office, and so on.

If I'm counting on you to securely host my files, I've got to be able to trust you. I understand why you did all of the things mentioned above (I've had LLCs w/ "hidden" registered agents because I didn't want my home address showing up in the public record, I also use a PO Box, etc.) but for a company I'm potentially trusting my sensitive data with, well, that's just not gonna fly. As a technically-proficient "advanced" user, I'm going to err on the side of caution and my paranoia is gonna cause me to say "Nope!" and quickly move on.

Like I said, you may be totally legit and have only the best of intentions, but (and this is the key part) I have no way of verifying that. None whatsoever. For all I know, this is a weak attempt at social engineering people out of their data by some fly-by-night company, and your service is going to simply disappear in a month or two. Now, I'm sure that's probably not the case, but how can I know that?

Ultimately, your target customers have to be able to trust you with their data... but how can they trust you when they don't know anything about you?

I really do wish you the best of luck with your idea and hopefully you can understand a little bit better why I can't (currently) use your service.

(Side note: if you make any changes and want my opinion or thoughts on them, I'd be open to giving it. My e-mail is in my profile if you want to reach out but -- fair warning -- I'm kinda slow at responding to non-urgent e-mails so please allow me a little time to get back to you.)

It is true that it is a post office for us to receive and send mail. At this time we do not have a public facing office. This will change as we grow.

Also how is "$1 / 10GB / month" going to result in me paying "less" for online storage?

S3 is $0.02/GB, or $0.2/10GB and $2/month gets you 100GB on Google Drive.

We were not aware that these options had direct sftp access. We've used Google Drive in the past but we didn't find it to be particularly user friendly (we haven't used S3). CloudBuddy could save you some money if you have low to moderate storage needs that require sftp access.

Rsync.net has direct SFTP and rsync for $0.03/GB/month: http://rsync.net/products/attic.html

And with the quality of service I expect from a service hosted on a Comcast connection, I'd say you're roughly comparable in reliability/quality to low end VPS providers like https://www.time4vps.eu/. From them you can get a 40GB VM for $2.35/mo.

Hi jlgaddis. It is true that we are using Comcast cable for business for our ISP. We have had good luck with them in the past. They certainly aren't perfect but for a new company like ours, they are a good fit. We plan to upgrade as we grow. Thanks for pointing out the lack of trust signals on our identify. We were so focused on getting this out that we completely missed how we had initially set this up. We will fix this. You apparently weren't the only one that had a lack of trust as this thread has been flagged (as spam?). Not sure who to ask to get this removed or even if it is possible.

When you can get a full cabinet + gigabit transit for $400/mo I don't think there's ever an excuse to put a paid service on a Comcast connection.

Yep. Even a co-located or dedicated server in a datacenter would be better than a Comcast connection (and probably cheaper) when just getting started. He could always "move up" later, when needed.

You got probably flagged because -- all things considered (see other comments) -- "CloudBuddy" seems pretty sketchy, to be honest. You do not inspire confidence or trust. At all.

<rant>

"We"? You keep saying "we" but, c'mon, we all know it's just you, running this off of a machine in your home office or garage or whatever.

I don't know why people always try to make their little companies seem much larger than they really are but... you know what? It's perfectly fine! It's okay to be a one-(wo)man shop, doing everything, at home, by yourself, in your spare time -- especially here on HN!. That's how a large number of companies start out. It's not something to be ashamed of or to try to hide.

This practice of trying to appear as some big large company is counter-productive. If you act like a big(ger) company, I'm going to treat you like one and call you out on things you should be doing (but can't, due to it just being you). If you stop pretending and just be honest -- "Hey, it's just me building this myself, trying to make a business out of it" -- then I'll cut you some slack and give you a chance.

Apparently "fake it until you make it" is still a thing.

</rant>

I'd worry it attracts the lower end of storage needs, those users in the $1-$3/month range, who wouldn't want to sign up to Dropbox or OneDrive ($7/month). Spending 15 minutes on a support email can already void profits, you wouldn't have much budget for customer acquisition, and it's hard to raise prices when the main selling point seems to be the low price.

Our target market is indeed the lower to mid end storage spectrum that wish - or need to have - direct sftp access. Our plan is to make a go of it by targeting this market segment.

Why not, but if you target devs and people in the IT field, they can do that themselves.

I would have signed up for a trial if you had some sort of app that made it easier to transfer files. I saw the instructions, and they're a pain. As a developer, I have 3TB of unused storage from a few OVH servers—some of it with automatic failover based on GlusterFS: I can just mount that and copy files via the Finder or terminal.

I guess I don't get it.

Re: ovh - I've been a customer of dedicated servers for 5+years, and never needed to contact support. Last week I got another new dedicated which shipped with mismatched dimms (the motherboard warns about the problem) and contacted support. A few days goes by and I still have not received an answer, and now I'm scared! This server is not in production yet, but what if I urgently need support on a production server?

What has been your experience with ovh support?

They have different SLAs for certain issues: https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sla.xml

Does the server boot? If so, you should use http://docs.ovh.ca/en/guides-ovh-rescue.html#hardware-check which should flag it to them I believe.

If the server doesn't boot it should have been picked up by their monitoring systems (I believe this is "Level 1").

Have you tried calling them?

I call them via phone and pick up right away, and they always have technicians on site.

"We send you a email to let you know that we are having difficulty charging your credit card. The email will also let you know that you have one week to resolve the issue [...]. If for some reason we are unable to charge your credit card within that time, your account (including all of your files) will be deleted."

One week!

How long would you expect them to host your data for free?

I'm confused on how you think this is 'less'. Onedrive is $6.99 a month for what you would charge $100 for.

How does this beat Backblaze? I pay $5 a month and I’ve no data caps?

I know I can’t start at a dollar but I can’t imagine many people backing up 0-10gb a month and that’s it

well, you can with backblaze b2... which is also far cheaper than their price per gigabyte.

Sorry yes I was referring to the personal backup plan.

We use b2 at work for our corporate offsite backups and I can’t praise it high enough.

We’ve had it running for over a year and it’s just been set and forget.

We use cloudberry as the backup tool and it’s been great.

B2 is obviously our third line backup for when all else fails but I have confidence in it and it’s cheap.

Two weeks from now: "CloudBuddy drops first month free due to rampant abuse"

Second step of the signup is providing a phone number (I guess they send you a code), so that's a good start.

sftp only?

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