Show HN: Affordable cloud storage and my story | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Affordable cloud storage and my story

extralayer.eu

3 pointsTom_DataHoarder5 comments

Hi there,

I'm Tom and I am a DataHoarder :) I'm based in Europe and I am a PHP programmer.

I've been Hoarding Data for over two decades now, going through all phases (losing data, having multiple copies of them, 3-2-1 rules etc), and I've noticed that it is getting very expensive after a while (well, you can notice that very fast nowadays hah).

All these started when I wanted to grab a couple of extra TBs of online storage to backup some secondary data. There aren't many affordable (mind you, $5-$7/TB might be cheap for some) options out there and all I wanted was to share a box with someone.

So I've decided to make a little project to "fix" this. Maybe there are more people out there who think the same (you never know until you try?). I've had my ups and downs but this is something I was really excited to code. This is also the first project I created after a long time (so please be kind :)). Hopefully it will make me get back to the game.

I'm basically splitting up the servers, no overselling or anything like that, and you can use (S)FTP, SCP, rsync, Rclone, Duplicati, BorgBackup to create your backups.

I'm offering 100GB Trials for a week for you to play around and provide any kind of feedback so I can improve either the quality of the service or the website itself. I know it requires a signup and email verification but I tried to make it as painless as possible :(

I'm already working on the next phase (the first one wasn't anything special, just a basic build :)) which I think can do wonders to decrease the cost of online storage even further. Hopefully it will be ready sometime in Q1 2023. I will let you know :)

Thank you for your time! Tom

PS: Hey! I said I 22 times within 325 words! Sorry..

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Interesting...here's some random thoughts:

zfs send/recv support? That seems to be the missing piece in the low-end cloud storage world. There's rsync.net and zfs.rent, but those seem to be targeting 10+ TiB. (My current solution is a 1 TiB 'storage' VPS for $3/month, running Debian ZFS on root. Works nicely, but scrubbing 600 GiB takes over a day!)

I'm not sure a one week trial is long enough, considering you're asking for annual payment up front. For instance, I didn't want to 'start the clock' by creating an account.

Borgbase has a 2 repo / 10 GB free tier, and lots of object storage services offer 20-75 GB free.

BTW, https://www.extralayer.eu/dashboard/registration.php has a broken link ( https://www.extralayer.eu/dashboard/index.html ). Several minor typos on https://www.extralayer.eu/terms-of-service.php and https://www.extralayer.eu/acceptable-use-policy.php, too.

Borg support is good. Might consider restic, too.

Location? I'd want to know where my data is.

Where do you get 1TB block storage for 3$/month? ZFS does not work with object storage.

There was a 50% off coupon code for https://www.interserver.net/vps/storage.html that brought it down from $6/month to $3/month. Not sure if the code is still active or if it works for larger plans.

Nice work Tom. Personally I am not sure if I would trust a storage provider without any imprint and a registered company. (btw the website is not gdpr compliant...) In addition, the ToS make me afraid using your service as a backup solution :-) "ExtraLayer.eu may cancel or suspend your access to ExtraLayer.eu services at any time and for any reason without notice. Upon cancellation or suspension, your right to use the service will stop immediately. You may not have access to data that you stored on the service after we suspend or terminate the service. " anyway, good luck with the project.

Thank you for you reply! I am already waiting for the paperwork (the process is a bit slow over here..) so I can be 100% legit and be good to go. I was just too eager to launch it, plus I thought it would be cool to make it to Black Friday :)

Oh my bad about GDPR, will fix that within the next couple of days!

As for the ToS I see it now. Will fix that too. I wanted to be safe but it does sound scary.

Thank you once again for the feedback!

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