Reading comments and thinking about all has happened this year, my good vibes start to fade away and I don’t see a future for home SNOs in 10 years.
I realy hope I’m wrong because, I liked this project even before I was a part of it, playing with GPUs and ASICs; maybe it’s the gamer part in me that loves to gatter resources and build up strong bases, similar to having a node and gattering data, data that matters, it’s real, no plots or crap, and being payed along the way as a bonus; I get why there are hobbist among us that only do it for the fun of it. Fun aside, I invested money in this and I hope to, at least, get even.
But taking a step back and looking at the big picture my epiphany is like this:
Storj realised that the decentralisation, as it stands now, it’s a failed project; can’t be sustainable long therm and can’t bring the revenues that they hopped for; and I’m starting to agree with them, like it or not.
they will slowly shift the storage to data centers, and get rid of home SNOs, either by abruptly cut us off, or, more elegant version, make us quit one by one.
even without forcing us, the aprox 5000 SNOs that we are now, we stopped multiplying, and we slowly quit, because payouts aren’t great, the data flow is slowly diminishing and shifting to datacenters, now that this is an option, and in 5 years the HDDs will start to fail in numbers, very few will be tempted to invest in new hardware, and in 10 years, there will be no home SNOs. I myself am faced with the decision to add drives or not, in a few months, and I realy don’t know what to do, for the first time in 2,5 years.
I don’t hold a grudge on Storj team and I can’t blame them for trying to run good business with a future; they are good businessmen, even though some will desagree; they adapt, they survive no matter what, they know how to stirr the rules in their favour, without making huge waves or storms. And the business model that they follow now makes them future proof; they rent space from parteners and sell it to customers. If one datacenter goes down, Storj isn’t affected, just makes a new contract with other datacenter. There are plenty and will be plenty. A very big advantage amongst competition like Hetzner and co, who are the seller and the owner of the datacenter.
I’m trying to be a pretty honest and fair guy, and tell it to your face no matter what, because the truth is better, and my point of failure is that I expect others to do the same. I know, I’m not a good businessman or politician . So I’m somehow pieced on myself for not wanting to see the warnings others gaved, and trusting Storj would be a very transparent and onest team, and give it to us straight their findings and future plans. Naivity can cost you big. Also, I want to give @IsThisOn a shout out for not being so naive as me and trying to open our eyes, in many posts.
Anyway, I realy realy hope I’m mistaken with all of this, and I realy hope I’m mistaken about Stroj team, and we are still home SNOs in 15 years.
With all respect, but you are wrong. The decentralization is a key feature and it unlikely will be abandoned easily, it’s a good technique to provide a CDN-like experience with zero additional costs.
Storj realised, that business requires old paper confirmations of reliability like SOC2, despite the fact that all data is encrypted with a strong encryption and has a high reliability due to erasure codes.
So, there is a SOC2-Complaint specialized network (still the same Storj protocol!).
We do not need to do that and do not want it. This usually done by SNO for a long time (take a look on nodes’ map).
Datacenters only for those who commited to SOC2, which are suggested only for those customers who requires SOC2 even if that mean more expensive storage and bandwidth.
This is more related to usual supply-demand. If the demand will grow, the supply will grow too. Right now only half of the supply is used accordingly stat.
I disagree. With evolving of “Smart Home” there will be only more home PCs not less. They will have a free storage, because vendors are interested to sell as much hardware as possible (even if it’s actually not needed). It perhaps would be not a magnetic mechanical drives but SSDs, nevertheless, it’s a free unused space. Bandwidth likely will only grow. Maybe even in Germany (I hope).
To be honest I would expect the grow from now not so covered countries, because many of them have lower costs for electricity and I hope that they would have a better internet in the future. I also think that solar-powered storage nodes are still the reality, even now:
Just take a look on all these deserts all over the world, they have a lot of sun. And Elon Musk will help to deliver the Internet there.
I realy hope you’re right, and I’m wrong, because I like being a part of this, and expanding my nodes. The comunity here is great and the all ideea of this project is great.
I didn’t lost hope in decentralisation, and I realy hope Storj didn’t too. Time will tell if all of this fuss is only for those certifications.
Something that might help you is a certain thing that I keep observing across industry. Customers are attracted to high-end solutions, but then want a low-cost solutions also available. For example in terms of AWS S3, I’ve seen it several times that while companies I worked with did take advantage of storage levels requiring certification, they also stored data on tiers as cheap as possible. Storj wouldn’t attract these companies as customers if they don’t offer certified storage, because these companies don’t want to spend money on testing and integrating with more and more suppliers. However, when they’re onboard already, they’ll gladly take advantage of cheaper offers by the same supplier if they can do that by just toggling a single switch. This is because 99% of data doesn’t need high-end certified-secure nvme storage, so why pay for it. But this 1% is the reason for choosing a supplier exactly to lower integration costs.
This is what I had in mind in the last paragraph of this post.
I expect the certified Datacenter network to end up growing faster on the consumer side than the home network. Simply because I think the certifications matter - and also that it avoids the look of having business data stored on “Billy’s pc in his bedroom”. So whilst I don’t think the home network will go away any time soon I do think the emphasis will change over time. Whether the supply is there for Storj to use is a different matter. Every week we are in conversation with clients - small and medium business - who want details of how we meet compliance standards with their data. This has been driven by the large number of data breeches in recent years.
Well. You guys want to change the original product to adapt to a wrong marketing/sale direction? What the hell is going on? It’s ridiculous. The product is good, the original idea is brilliant, many people here agree with that. If you’re struggle to get new customers then think about the quality of your marketing/sale team. Maybe you just need to hire other people.
Will there be a minimum amount of storage/nodes/servers for the Commercial node operators? I can maybe get a server into a proper datacenter.
What about the data integrity requirements? The same as for home nodes (lose enough data and get disqualified) or something different, maybe allowing backups?
Other thoughts - on one hand I understand that some customers may demand certificates. It does not matter if the data is safe or not, it only matters if there is a piece of paper. Maybe the law or some other certification requires it.
However, if the commercial operators are paid less than home operators AND customers are charged more, then it is more profitable for Storj to develop/promote the commercial version more than the home/public one. Even if customers are charged the same, it would still be more profitable to use the commercial operators. In that case, why bother with the public network at all (if it makes less money and cannot be certified)?
i know i have been mostly negative about this new program…
but this is one of the upsides… more usage and knowledge about Storj DCS, which might benefit consumer tier SNOs indirectly.
Still not convinced it is going to be all good, but there has certainly been a lot of interesting debate about it.
and i hope StorjLabs will keep pushing for getting something like SOC2 and other certs on the consumer tier network, so we can steal that workload from the data centers
People who are not knowledgeable about It like certifications.
Heck, even ITIL was driven by accountants - NOT IT professionals.
But it is the bean counters who make many of the purchasing decisions and the location of Storj nodes in Datacenters does look more professional
I don’t see the new DC network cannibalizing home SNO’s at least in the short term. Because I think it is more likely those clients would simply not have been Storj customers to start with. You can’t lose what you never would have had.
For my own company we tend to stick with established players in markets - because we don’t like re-doing work that needs to be charged out to clients. So, we tend to be very “sticky” with our service suppliers.
They’re more similar than you think. I think many people do both of those things as a hobby and just to make some extra on the side. Not to outcompete the big players. It’s just fun and a little bit of cash is a nice bonus. Whether you sell tomatoes or run a node.
I wouldn’t call that greed.
SOC2 doesn’t judge quality. It doesn’t even judge security to be honest. Not in a cryptographic sense at least. It just tests very specific (kind of outdated in the context of a product like Storj) security mitigations. (As I’m sure you are well aware, I’m just stating it as context for others)
I don’t think this was a dodge. I was confused by your phrasing as well until I saw this response. It seemed you were suggesting the commercial network would be “better” in other ways too.
Well, I agree mostly. However it will depend on how that network is marketed. It being more profitable creates an incentive to upsell customers even if they don’t need the certifications. And it would be trivial to convince a customer that that network will also be more stable/secure/performant etc. So in the end whether or not it will in fact cannibalize the public network will depend a lot on how honest Storj marketing and sales will be in that process.
With your analogy SOC2 is more like deliver the same tomatoes in the silver boxes exactly for people who believes (in the Corp world they are forced to): “they are healthier than the same tomatoes in wooden boxes, because silver has bactericidal properties”, despite the fact that you will need to wash them from dirt and dust (decrypt) anyway to be able to eat (deliver content) them.
Or even in the same wooden boxes but with a verified and confirmed certificate, that they are stored in the warehouse made of silver.
Just not to open another thread, Backblaze has will increase by $1 starting Oct. 3.
Backblaze will soon make several updates to B2 Cloud Storage as part of our continuing work to provide the best high-quality, low-cost cloud storage alternative to traditional cloud providers like AWS. I’m writing today to outline the changes, which involve updates to our pricing as well as platform improvements you can expect to see in the months ahead. I’ll unpack them one by one:
Storage Price Increase: Effective October 3, 2023, we are increasing the monthly pay-as-you-go storage rate from $5/TB to $6/TB. The price of B2 Reserve will not change.
Free Egress: Also effective October 3, we’re making egress free (i.e. free download of data) for all B2 Cloud Storage customers—both pay-as-you-go and B2 Reserve—up to three times the amount of data you store with us, with any additional egress priced at just $0.01/GB. Because supporting an open cloud environment is central to our mission, expanding free egress to all customers so they can move data when and where they prefer is a key next step.
Product Upgrades: From Object Lock for ransomware protection, to Cloud Replication for redundancy, to more data centers to support data location needs, Backblaze has consistently improved B2 Cloud Storage. Stay tuned for more this fall, when we’ll announce upload performance upgrades, expanded integrations, and more partnerships.
Some things that aren’t changing: Storage pricing on committed contracts, B2 Reserve pricing, and unlimited free egress between Backblaze B2 and many leading content delivery network (CDN) and compute partners are all not changing. And, of course, there’s no change in our commitment to providing performant yet affordable cloud object storage for every customer who entrusts B2 Cloud Storage with their data.
You can find more information on the Backblaze blog including a FAQ covering some of the questions you might have, and you can always reach our Support Team at hello@backblaze.com for questions specific to your business.
So its’s something like filecoin?
Maybe I’am wrong but what I so much like about Storj project is it is so decentralised vs filecoin etc…
If you add the big company’s to the public network you really become decentralised even for them.
Why not give the give the ‘small public network’ a change to become SOC2 with ‘self assesment software’ ?
Lot of coding and maybe yet another contract with a software company…
&&
Big company’s maybe not as happy, but it will come close, no?
A big plus for all the storagenode who can provide that self assesment SOC2. Nodes fill up more quickly, maybe you can even stop with transition of the pricing because you will need a lot of storage SOC2.
Please don’t be like filecoin. Multiple Pb on one location, nothing decentalised by that!
I guarantee you really make a big impact on how storage should be handled in the future…
A SOC2 audit can cost upwards of 10k, and that’s not including the costs needed to comply, which can be significant (Over $140,000 in one estimate). Also, a lot of these types of certifications require physical security (Cameras, locks, processes and procedures) on top of employee policies to report things and how that all gets managed and reported.
Okay, was afraid you gonna say somerhing like that. But there must be also a way in the middle, no? I mean a lot of company’s woul propably pay more for better encription, more secured dedicated installed storagenode. Ensured backup, bandwith, … Must be somerhing you could do to try to keep maybe smaller companies on the mainnet as mush as possible. So you deffintly not end like filecoin.
I would like to see if you can diverse yourself from the rest (icp,filecoin).
The totally decentralised storage of storj is something to be proud of. Would be a shame to give it away…
We have companies with large data sets on the public network and I know of one adding half a petabyte of data by October. And we continue to add companies to the public network all the time. The data center side is for customers who need something very specific. It is a more contractual and planned deployment which takes longer to put together and deploy. As mentioned, we are still in the early stages of this. The existing product works great for most customer’s needs and because of it’s large distributed network of SNO’s it makes it ideal for some types of applications looking for high speed and secure distribution.
Also, I think before too long we’ll see adoption of other companies becoming Satellite owners and distributing paid data on SNO drives. The long term public side has a bright future because it can grow beyond Storj Labs customer base. There are still steps to get from here to there, but as changes get deployed things continue to improve for everyone and it gets better all the time.
. So I’m somehow pieced on myself for not wanting to see the warnings others gaved, and trusting Storj would be a very transparent and onest team, and give it to us straight their findings and future plans. Naivity can cost you big. Also, I want to give @IsThisOn a shout out for not being so naive as me and trying to open our eyes, in many posts.
