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Comment by jtolds | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflyer (https://www.cloudflyer.io/) offers free migrations from S3 to Storj. Storj is $4/TB/mo, $7/TB egress. It's decentralized storage, so the base functionality has CDN-like performance (no Cloudfront needed), and you don't need to pay extra for multiregion redundancy.

I jumped on the Nix Foundation Matrix to try and help them directly, but for anyone reading this thread, Storj might be able to cut a zero off your storage costs. Check us out!

Full disclosure - I work for Storj. https://www.storj.io/

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"you’ll be paid in STORJ Token." https://www.storj.io/node

This statement basically makes me unable to take this seriously.

At "Egress Bandwidth $20/TB" it should pay off to buy up all the cheap hetzner servers and convert them to storj nodes. They would pay themselves back after 2 TB and then you are off making profit.

But wait, there is more:

They charge 7$ for egress bandwidth... How can they pay 20$ to the one providing the bandwidth. Oh, right they don't actually pay the operator, they give you a crypto token.

So all in all paying for storj feels like supporting yet another crypto scheme.

Certainly there are differing opinions about cryptocurrency in general.

In terms of "does the math work", you're absolutely right that charging $7/TB and paying $20/TB to our storage node operators is not sustainable. But it shouldn't be a surprise that this was an intentional early subsidy to grow the supply side of the network. In an open system like ours, you see these business dynamics, whereas you might just not see them otherwise.

To be fully transparent, we are working to reduce that subsidy now that we're hitting scale. You can see some of our conversations with our storage node operator community about this on our forum: https://forum.storj.io/t/announcement-changes-to-storj-node-.... You can also see full network stats here: http://stats.storjshare.io/

It it a bit mean to anyone who has invested in equipment to supply to the network and used the subsidised numbers to work out if it will be profitable. This should be clearer on the website.

This seemed interesting, and I had a quick look at a few pages on the Storj website. The website looks like its geared towards the enterprise segment. At the same time, I didn’t see any prominent link to a comparison page. Comparing with Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, etc., would be quite useful.

On integrations, I see there’s a tech preview for Restic. Any plans to support Borg? Is there a platform roadmap available publicly? I’m primarily looking as a single user to store larger backups. The Storj pricing (only for storage, not for egress) seems to be a lot lower than that of rsync.net (even with the special HN Reader’s discount).

This is really good feedback, thank you.

The platform roadmap is available here: https://github.com/orgs/storj/projects/23. Good question about Borg. We are supported by rclone natively, and I've seen some success with people combing Borg and rclone. But that's certainly something we can look into more.

Very quickly, the roadmap page you linked to seems to be available only for GitHub users (and probably people who are also given permissions on your repo?). I only see a long list of “You can’t see this item” cards.

They're hiding their not-yet-cleared queue, if you scroll to the right there should be visible cards, even logged-off.

On an unrelated note, the Storj landing page spells the word 'compatibility' wrong ('compatability').

ooh, that's embarrassing. thanks for pointing that out. fixed now

The same typo seems to be in other places too. I just noticed it in the Products submenu under Why Storj.

And the canary "shows" that there's been subpoenas served:

https://www.storj.io/canary.txt

Oh, boy! It really begs the question if these are even trustworthy at all.

Here's the HN conversation about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34192336

I really like the storj concept - distributed storage, local encryption. Comes from tahoe-lafs I believe, except you don't need to find 10 buddies.

There is one main reason I don't use it besides web share: Despite being OSS, uplink-cli is not available in linux distribution packages, which

- makes me uneasy about stability/maturity of the platform (e.g. do you not provide packages because you don't have a stable API, and if so, should I really rely on you to keep my data?)

- it increases friction - either build from source or manually copy binaries; and you have need to do this on all your machines and servers; and it means no automatic updates

- binaries/packages without trusted update channels may be against corporate/personal policies, and you usually want your storage accessible on all/most of your computers

- if available in non-distribution package repositories (didn't see in quick-start) - it would still create trust issues

Have you considered getting your cli packages in distributions?

If I could just `apt install uplink-cli` or similar, I would already be using it.

How do you convert Storj tokens to USD?

As a customer of Storj, this isn't something you'll need to worry about. We're integrated with Stripe and take credit cards and invoices. We will also take STORJ token if you want.

If you are looking to provide storage space to the network as a storage node operator, then your nearest reputable exchange should do the trick.

I think to serve files over WebTorrent / BitTorrent with a (HTTP) web seed stored across blob stores at Cloudflare R2 / Backblaze B2 / Wasabi is a better model for a distributed CDN.

Perfect use case for Storj. I hope they take you up on that.

Why not offer to sponsor them and cut all the zeroes? When I built a hosting business that was most of our marketing and it worked really well.

We're hoping they respond to some of our reach outs for a deeper discussion! But if for some reason you're reading this here, NixOS Foundation folks, my email is in my profile!

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