2. Do you intend or allow these VMs to be used as web servers or any other kind of server?
Here, we are pretty much providing a datacenter hookup for your hard-drive. If that hard-drive fails, we can ship it to you for recovery, but that's on you.
The idea for this site is that most people with ZFS pools already have a mirror/RAIDZ setup at home, and would enjoy the peace of mind if they had one-extra data-sink to send their snapshots.
Therefore, true data-loss will occur if:
* Their house burns down
* AND the remote zfs.rent hard drive fails
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Personally, I live about 20 minutes aways from my parents' house. I have two separate ZPools (one for my place, one for theirs). I sync the two every time I visit.
I wanted an extra cloud machine to sync to once a week or so -- you know, in case Northern California fires really get out-of-hand :/
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EDIT: I went to rsync.net just to double-check. It looks like they are running their own infrastructure now.
https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html
Maybe my memory is going haywire, but I swear I remembered reading that they used AWS as their backend.
A few things ...
I love your website and domain name, etc. I wish more people operated like this.
I want very much not to mention, or have anyone else discuss, (other competitors) because this is your HN frontpage day.
... so I will just quickly clarify: rsync.net (which predates AWS) has always run on our own hardware that we assemble ourselves. Also, we have no cold storage option or functions - we only provide live, online, random access storage.
... and now let's return to zfs.rent and their day in the sun :)
Avoid making comments about competitors unless you are certain it is the truth.
I ended up using rsync.net with borgbackup.
I think the better comparison would be an SX-line dedicated server from Hetzner [0] and this server isn't too far off that.
This service: $10 for 8TB, or $1.25/TB.
Hetzner SX62: 64€ for 40TB, or €1.6/TB ($1.9 USD).
> rsync.net
Rsync.net is ridiculously overpriced. Even at their cheapest tier, 1TBmonth costs $15, for which you can buy 7.9TB at Hetzner. Even if you created 3 redundant copies at Hetzner, you'd be paying only half what rsync.net would charge.
[0]: https://www.hetzner.com/de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx?co...
Your Hetzner numbers are impressive, but I don't think there's anything available in the US for a similar cost. Most block storage I've seen is ~$10/mo/TB. I would love to be proven wrong on that.
I know it's not what you meant but keep in mind that as-described, that's every single server provider.
And I think including what you meant (e.g. ZFS set up), it's literally a one-line command to create a new zpool on a new server.
I'm not saying that rsync.net is worthless but it's certainly not worth the price it's charging for anyone who cares about the price.
> Your Hetzner numbers are impressive, but I don't think there's anything available in the US for a similar cost.
When I was in the US I came to the same conclusion, so went with colocation.
However OVH has a datacenter just over the border in Canada and its brands Kimsufi, SoYouStart and OVH [0-2] can get you down to $5/TBmonth.
And it looks like they actually have a couple of US datacenters now, which is new. A quick look shows that you can get a 16TB server for $92/month [3], which is $5.75/TBmonth.
But overall it looks like the dedicated server market in the US is still super expensive. You can always keep your bulk data in Europe.
[0]: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml
The compromises seem to be spelled out in the description in a fairly straight forward manner. There isn't flexibility beyond 8TB storage blocks, and it defaults to just one which in my opinion is fairly useless for ZFS, you lose some of the real self-healing and safety advantages (yeah you can have copies within a single drive, but that halves/thirds your space just like a mirror and it'll be slower and with less redundancy than just two half sized drives in a mirror). So basically double or more the pricing there. The data transfer limits and pricing on that is also somewhat higher, so not for high churn. I'm assuming that "1 TB included" is per month, so for offsite replication essentially there'd be a "loading fee" per drive, then bandwidth is covered going forward if churn is less than 1 TB/month. And even in the best case they don't claim you'd be able to saturate even 1 Gbps, so loading will take a while. At 100 Mbps bringing an 8 TB pool to ~3/4 would take around 6 days. There is no SLA, appears to be no autobackups or anything like that.
The pricing could use some more clarity too. Under rent-to-own for example, it's not clear what the pricing is after you have covered the drive(s). Not clear what payments they take and through what service. I wouldn't personally put keys there either, but since ZFS supports raw send/receive there is less need to trust the far side unless your metadata is sensitive as well.
So basically it's ultra bare bones, for cheap.
Which isn't a bad thing to have in the mix. I'm happy to see more space for people to experiment with very minimal focused efforts that lean more heavily on ZFS itself to try to economize vs traditional models. Personally, right now this is still a bit farther on the rough side of the line then I'd feel comfortable with (I'd want to at least have a vague idea of who they were and where exactly the data center in question is). But the basic idea is a neat one, amortizing something someone wanted to do anyway.