Hacker News Reader

Comment by onionjake | Hacker News Reader

Hi, CTO of CrowdStorage here. Happy to answer any questions. I'm doing my best to respond to comments.

Our website is right now being redesigned and your comments here are helpful to help us know where we need to improve!

Your site says it's distributed, but honestly it has no details of how it works. Is it built on top fo SIA, STORJ or similar? How does it work? How does one "become a node", etc.

The fact they seem to refuse to answer WHERE the storage is coming from is honestly pretty concerning. It's been asked multiple times in this thread and they don't seem interested in addressing it.

For all we know the storage is coming compromised hosts that don't even know they're participating.

Yeah, I wouldn't trust my data to a service I have no idea how it works.

Not trying to obscure anything, just busy this morning :)

I answered the parent.

I just found this poking around on their website:

https://crowdstorage.com/faq/#where-is-my-data-stored

Where is my data stored?

Your data is intelligently encrypted on your My Cloud Home and sliced into tiny pieces that only you can put back together. The encrypted data pieces are scattered across our community of users, using small portions of our member’s unused hard drive space. Spreading your data out in this way makes it more safe and secure than it would be if it was all stored in one location.

We are not built on top of Sia or Storj. Our technology has been developed for the past decade and is independent.

Storage comes from services that we offer to end consumers. In exchange for our services they agree to let us use the unused storage on device, i.e. (https://crowdstorage.com/products/device-backup/). We plan on expanding to many more devices.

Storage also comes from being able to transparently leverage more traditional storage that we purchase from various providers.

This is still not a clear answer. Where is the data? who are those people holding the data? how do they enroll in this?

It is a service you can sign up for https://crowdstorage.com/products/device-backup-my-cloud-hom.... Stay tuned for support on more devices in the future (i.e. synology, qnap, etc.).

We also purchase storage in datacenters.

So, you're selling unused space in your own hardware? I'm sorry but It's not really clear.

I answered the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26581857

What is your opinion about https://min.io/ (It also has S3 compatibility AFAIK)

Do you have plans for non US regions? (Or do you have in US regions that are not currently obvious?)

Yes! Our storage footprint globally is growing so we will definitely add more regions.

What region in particular interests you?

We span many right now. Primarily APAC (serving customers in Jakarta by way of Singapore and soon Thailand), as well as South America.

How do you handle the problem of low interest? Do you preseed a region with storage servers so you have enough shards to store all the data until you have enough in-market storage endpoints?

I agree that the egress pricing seems a little disingenuous but model doesn't typically egress much more than 100%. Will take a closer look, when there's time.

> How do you handle the problem of low interest?

We can seamlessly leverage more traditional storage as well as distributed endpoints. So in a way yes we can 'seed' it. We will likely wait until we have enough storage in a region before launching there.

> the egress pricing seems a little disingenuous

I have made small edits to the website to make it clearer it is 100% of data stored is free egress. This is definitely something we will focus on in the redesign.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com