The new and rebranded website is insane.
However I suggest to offer different price models. Also a Modell with higher TB static price and without egress fees.
Well, the problem you have there is that node operators would reduce their outgoing bandwidth to minimums if they weren’t being paid for its use. Egress is profit for everyone in the cloud business. Retention alone is just a race to the bottom as it gets cheaper every year.
4 Likes
I mean only this plan for your customers. Not for SNO.
Do you mean actively capping it or ordering cheaper lines with less overall bandwidth?
I suppose they could do either. Though ingress bandwidth would be initially helpful to fill their storage.
As for the customers having to not pay egress, but Storj paying for that egress to the SNO’s, that isn’t a good business model. It would not be profitable and would likely resort to Storj losing money and going out of business.
I don’t know if this assumption is correct in a general fashion.
Let’s take an ASDL line from my provider as an example. They offer: 50/10, 100/40 and 250/40.
As Up- and Download bandwidth can not be selected independently from each other it would not make sense to order just a 50/10 line as this would substantially hurt my ingress. And between 100/40 and 250/40 the egress bandwidth stays the same. I could even be tempted to order the larger download one to fill my disks faster.
All this would have no impact on egress in this case.
ADSL goes only up to 1 or 2 Mbps upload… Just saying…
Had it, it was terrible.
If you’re profitable using say 100mbit egress, making $50 a month. (Just an example)
Then the model changes and we don’t pay for egress, just retention. You lose $50 a month.
You call your ISP and reduce your egress speed to 10mbit. Saving money. Slowing the egress.
But really, I imagine most people would do it via their home network/software tools and just reduce the bandwidth on their nodes.
1 Like
Yes, but as showed with actual numbers with my ISP, you cannot just reduce the upload bandwidth. So if you reduce egress to 10 mbit, your ingress gets smashed es well.
And the idea of reduced or no egress cost is to compensate with much much more ingress and faster filling of disks.
So a user who would reduce his ingress bandwidth to reduce his egress bandwidth would definitely shoot into his own knee.
Right, but as Knowledge was saying, nothing stops you from throttling your upload to comic levels. Absolutely nothing. Customers would get terrible speeds, find it comic as well and abandon ship.
2 Likes
Yes, this is potentially possible, but how likely is that. I mean is it just an assumption or do we have facts that show that SNOs would act in this way?
Imagine a world without traffic laws and imagine the ensuing chaos. Is it just an assumption or do we have facts that will show drivers would act in this way?
In terms of controlling outbound bandwidth to reduce their network usage? Yes, it was done often when we were on v2.
Also, consider a healthy Storj network with a lot of egress going on. We want our customers to have fast transfer times. If Sno’s make more money by transferring data faster, they will purchase faster connections where it makes sense for them to do so, because it will be more profitable for them. If we didn’t pay for their egress, they would not upgrade and likely use minimal egress to reduce cost.
2 Likes
In General People Order 5 TB and they use only 250 Gb. So they pay every month for 5 TB I think this will work
My view is just a little bit different on this. As without ingress your node is nothing. Without ingress you don’t get paid for data stored nor for egress, because there is simply no data to send.
So artificially capping the ingress bandwidth does not make sense. In fact once the ingress bandwidth gets saturated it would make sense to upgrade.
And here is what I am saying: At least with my provider upgrading ingress bandwidth comes with an upgrade of the egress bandwidth. There is no option to have it otherwise. So if someone has a 50/10 line and needs to upgrade because the ingress get stuck, then the 100/40 line is his only next option. And there it is, the upgrade of the egress bandwidth without the additional requirement to pay for it. It simply comes with the upgrade of the ingress bandwidth.
And that is consistent with other providers as well. One starts at 100/40 an upgrade puts you on 300/100 and if you upgrade this you end at 600/200 or even 1000/300.
You see any upgrade of the ingress bandwidth results in an upgrade of the egress bandwidth as well if the SNO like it or not.
And I am just speaking for myself here. But when my inbound line is saturated, so that I cannot store all the data I could then I would upgrade my line. If that results in high egress bandwidth as well (at no additional cost) it would never come to my mind to artificially cap the egress bandwidth. I simply don’t see why somebody would do that in such a scenario.
I don’t see the advantage in such an action and therefore don’t see the rationale behind it.
Prices are for used space though, not allotted, AFAIK.
@jammerdan You are talking about Internet connection contracts. This has nothing to do with actual bandwidth provided to Storj network. In the case you provide, it would make sense to maximize ingress bandwidth and cap egress bandwidth of the node, as you would have no incentive to provide any egress at all. You would have incentive to keep egress low actually, less strain on the hardware and you can use it for something else.
I think you’re maybe looking at it as a 1 to 1 thing here. Someone uploads 1 gig, they take 1 gig. Balances it out. But what business does is that they upload 1 gig, and then offer that 1 gig to the world, so that your egress bandwidth is pegged and constantly being pulled on to feed that 1 gig to whoever is pulling on it. Your node would be occupied feeding the egress requests, and your network activity would be maxed out. It would be great for business to put the new Marvel movie on Storj for $5 a month in storage fees, and then let the world download it for free.
But that kind of thing is unsustainable because there is no incentive to expand egress bandwidth. Good will alone won’t do it.
There is a reason why the entire industry is modeled this way. Bandwidth is the expense, and finite, not storage. Storage continues to get cheaper and cheaper. There is no money to be made storing data alone because the excess availability of it will make it worthless before too long.
3 Likes
Yes, I see there are different use cases.
However even with finite bandwidth there is this main difference, the bandwidth is free for SNOs. At least I assume that most of them have flat rates where for which it does not make any difference how much data get through.
So based on this what you are basically saying is: Customer is using this resource so he should pay for it otherwise I throttle him for nothing.
I’d rather see the big picture. Egress throttling is selfish and hurts the entire network. It could turn customers down which in the end hurts the amount of data hosted on the network.
SNOs in fact not having to pay for the traffic is a huge advantage compared to servers in data centers and if traffic is really really cheap for customers or even free, this can turn into a big advantage for Storj with more customers storing even more data.
Free, but not unlimited. You’d be amazed how quickly all of that bandwidth is gobbled up if customers find out they can start using Storj as a free distribution platform. Nodes upstream would grind to a halt and performance for all customers would be horrible. It’s a limited and valuable resource. And it should be treated as such to some extent. This is why egress either costs money or is horribly slow.
2 Likes
With my old contract I already came close to using up my 12mbit/s upload bandwidth when the storj network was a little more busy. At least I already saw lots of capped spikes.
The download bandwidth of 250mbit would never be used up by storj otherwise I couldn’t buy enough hdds before they fill up again 
So please convince me to buy a more expensive internet contract just to provide more free egress… My good will isn’t big enough to do that.
“You get what you pay for”. And if you don’t pay for egress, don’t expect much.