I see. But still does not make sense. Plenty of commercial companies build upon and make profit from opensource and free software.
So if you contribute to commercial entities (both storj and its users) directly it’s a no-no but if you contribute to Linux kernel on your free time — then it’s ok?
Yes. An accurate summary.
Thank you! I just find this irrational — because Linux kernel is used by plenty commercial companies to make profit.
On the other hand nobody said any behavior shall be rational. I don’t have any problem with that, just explaining my point of view.
Perfectly ok and I am in no way taking offence at what you are saying here. But, I am unlikely to change my view as well.
But I still think your use of “greedy” is very presumptuous. lol.
I would like to see an estimation how much change in the payout for egress and total would be with that pricing for SNOs. I would appreciate if you can share a Stat.
Providers in that situation will now just cap egress.
It makes no sense to host a node if you don’t have unlimited traffic. It also makes no sense to pay for capped connection in the first place. 1.2TB is peanuts today. If you use data in any nontrivial way you’ll blow though it. My data usage is 6-10TB/month for the past few years.
And Comcast has a permanent promotion where you get unlimited bandwidth pretty much for free for two years. Then every two years call them, rinse, repeat, indefinitely. I’ve been using these their “promo” rates for over a decade. You just need to scroll a bit in the list of “offers”, and then call and ask for the same discount as new users get. And be ready to walk away – but you won’t have to. They still want you as a customer even if you don’t pay them $30 for nothing.
In most markets they are upgrading infrastructure, you will be getting up to 400Mbps upstream - it’s pretty cool!
Sometimes you just don’t have a choice depending on where you live. This was true for me when I lived in Montreal, is true for a work colleague who lives in Utah as well as several clients we have in Australia.
You always have a choice to cancel, even if there are no alternatives (which I would be surprised – there are always plenty of DLS companies around; and DSL is arguably “better” – it’s symmetric with much higher upstream bandwidth compared to cable. Maybe not overall better – but enough to be a bargaining chip)
And then once you cancel – your wife, uncle, friend, whoever, moves in to that address and starts a new account as a new customer on promo rate. What do you know, very popular house – every two year new tennant!
After previous reduction people steel adding lot of free space, even faster than customers use it.
So this was the sign of further reductions, so will see now what happens after this reduction of price.
What’s up, bro?!
This is a very bold and not substantiated statement - that the network is stable.
Nodes are running in at least 12,357 subnets /24.
I think that we can talk about the number /24 - 12,357, and not about the mythical figure of 22,078 nodes. This is just dust in the eyes.
Also, I would not strongly believe the information about free space on the network - free disk space if it is a dynamically expanding disk cannot be checked and I do not believe in the stated figures of free space on the network.
And here we come to the most important thing - what will happen when a large client suddenly arrives and the space on the network runs out. I understand that some percentage of the storage on the nodes is occupied by garbage that can be deleted.
BUT! Let’s consider the option that the free space has really run out - how in this case will the storj be able to stimulate the addition of space on the nodes by operators? The current payments will not allow you to go and buy a disk with a 5-year warranty - the accounting accounting doesn’t add up.
I completely agree with your assessment Vadim. Particularly since Storj stated one goal they had was to increase node utilization rates. They weren’t able to grow organically fast enough to do this so this was the alternative they came up with.
Vadim, this is not an audited free space on the network, literally at all.
It takes non-zero effort to run a node. OK, maybe there are lots of people who don’t mind setting up a node on their always-on NAS or computer with 1TB free space and then not doing anything else with it, I don’t know.
However, for me, it’s like this - I’m OK with doing something for free, but only if it benefits other people who also give/get something for free, so maybe I’ll also get something for free from them.
A good example would be seeding a torrent. I don’t get paid for it, but I also don’t pay for downloading from other people. It’s like a big collaboration.
Another example would be open source projects (if I actually was able to program stuff), like the Linux kernel. Sure, lots of for-profit companies use it, but regular people also use it and multiple people collaborating on developing it makes it better for everyone.
Now, consider what Storj has said in other threads (paraphrased) “our aim is large enterprises that would pay us a lot of money and not require a lot of support”. Well, good enough, Storj is a for-profit company, but in that case I do not want to work for it for free. Just like I avoid self-checkout in a store - I am not working as a cashier for free - either give me a discount or just pay your cashier to do the job.
The 10 cents are precisely why I keep the bottles and cans intact and take them to the deposit machine instead of squashing them and throwing them in a plastic/metal trash can (if at home or close to one) or a regular trash can (if away from home).
At least here you are not allowed to squash the cans and bottles or damage them in any other way if you want your 10 cents back, so the empties take up a lot of space in storage until I get to recycle them.
By the way, at one time, the recyclers whined that the return rate of the deposit items was over 90%. I guess they were expecting people to just pay the 10 cents and not try to get them back.
Back on topic:
My attention on keeping something working is based on how much I get paid. Or rather, I can give you an example from the Storj v2 days.
I ran a few nodes on some hard drives (some I had, some I bought) with no RAID and not much monitoring. I had modified the node software to run better and not just load the IO at 100%. Anyway, I got quite a few tokens for it and I monitored the node servers quire closely. One of them (the biggest) had a habit of locking up once in a while (every few months) so I would reboot it.
Later, the use of the v2 network went down, with v3 being in development. My payouts also went down by a lot and at the time I just lost interest in the nodes. I still would sometimes check them, but at one time, the big node stayed locked up for a few months before I noticed it.
I do not really care about the payout rates on Storj - I care about the total I get. Reduced rates would be OK, if the traffic went up accordingly. As it is now, the rates go down and traffic stays the same or even goes down.
Well, I sound like a broken record, but you can’t outrun economics for long.
previous price adjustment
And that was before Backblaze decided to offer customers 3 times the amount they store as free egress traffic!
There is not enough data in the system and one reason for that is the high price for customers. Customer prices need to go down! It is not competitive at the moment!
This also aged well:
get the basics done first!
Half a year later there is still no Synology documentation…
Remember that Adobe Video partner thing that got hyped in the forum?
Well the page itself is still this
Adobe Partners Storj
Yes I totally agree with you on this point.
I cannot begin to tell you just how much I agree with this. I loathe those self service checkouts for oh so many reasons…
Looking back at my previous calculations here:
(Update Proposal for Storage Node Operators - #446 by IsThisOn)
I think it is time for an update of that calculation.
From a customer’s point of view, they pay 4$/TB storage and 7$/TB download. It doesn’t matter if they download from S3, HTTP or any other edge server or use the native STORJ uplink.
From the STORJ perspective, they pay the nodes 1.5$/TB and need to pay 2.7 nodes. That is a total of 4$/TB they pay for storage and 2$/TB egress. What we don’t know is how much they pay per TB traffic for edge services. We only know how much they pay for edge services in total. 2.7M in Q4 2022 or in other words, more than twice of what they pay to nodes! I assume their costs are roughly the same as the rest of the industry so I will use 5$/TB for traffic. Maybe someone from STORJ can chime in on that.
From a node perspective, we get 1.5$/TB for STORAGE and 2$/TB egress.
What does that mean in reality?
Use case 1: a customer uploads 1TB, stores that for one month, and then download that again over a native integration. In that case, the client pays 11$ (4$ storage plus 7$ download) to STORJ. STORJ pays 6$ (2$ egress + 4$ storage) to nodes. This gives STORJ a profit of 5$
Use case 2: a customer uploads 1TB, stores that for one month, and then download that again over S3. In that case, the client pays 11$ (4$ storage plus 7$ download) to STORJ. STORJ pays 6$ (2$ egress + 4$ storage) to nodes plus 5$ to run the S3 gateway. This is a net zero.
The new economic model finally makes kind of sense.
Too bad that the current customer pricing is not competitive and needs to go down. Which will change that calculation once again.
I made several time suggestions to Storj to make some kind of traffics nodes that will handle gateway traffics, this will lower Storj expenses very much. For Example Hetzner traffic is 20$ per TB
In Germany you can get contracts where you pay 5€ per tb traffic. (Or maybe even lower)
