Thank you for the warning… to bad i guess?! i just finished deploying my first node and the plan was to try this out for 3-6 months, since i got a bunch of 3tb and 6tb NAS drives i was thinking of deploying them all, investing just in the hardware to run them wich isn’t that much but even so my expected ROI would come on the worst case scenario, only in the third year “taking energy costs into the equation, replacements, {BAD LUCK}, etc”, with these news will probably try some other platform or just “deploy” them straight to the second hand market.
Good luck to everyone.
Can you not run the other HDDs on the same hardware? These changes won’t happen right away and if you have the HDD’s anyway, you might as well use them until we know more about these changes. You can always sell them later if it doesn’t work out.
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I’ve mounted one on a 1 bay QNAP, unfortunately i’m a laptop user for quite some time i have 0 hardware to run this except a bag of sata cables xD
But it was a fun process to make all the dockers run, node - exporters - prometheus - grafana, and simulating if i could do the same on a VM debian 11 for my future plan. This community is great, you have the best tutorials and guides.
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Any USB ports on that NAS? That’s how I run lots of my nodes on a Synology.
Definitely agree about the community here. It’s a good place to be for sure!
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Yes but its a ts-128a and with only one node, whatchtower, log exporter, node exporter, prometheus, grafana with everything else removed from it, i get cpu spikes of 50% and only have 400mb ram remaining most of the time, i don’t think it will scale up, i thought about those USB qnap box’s with raid controller onboard, but for 12 disks, it is cheaper just to straight build something low cost despite the fact that increases Watts consumption… but now is just too much hassle for a future revenue cut.
Yeah, definitely at most a wait and see for something like that.
Are you planning to find more customers at ETH Denver? I think Data Center World 2023 is much better place to send team.
There is a lot of investors at ETH Denver though… I was actually supposed to be there this year but had some scheduling conflicts.
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The team has a comprehensive agenda for ETH Denver.
Thank you for suggesting Data Center World 2023.
These decisions are not under my purview, but the company always appreciates and considers constructive suggestions.
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What is STORJ doing to integrate with and attract usage and partnerships from the Cardano community and ecosystem?
I think I see a boot in someones future if this keeps up.
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Haha. Long thread. I read all posts. Omg. My bad English. Okay let’s start.
First. About marketing. You guys don’t even run any ads. I’ve never seen any Storj ads in search result, Youtube or any social networks. Don’t tell me that I’m not in your customer target audience, because at the same time I’ve seen ads from almost all of your competitors. Why all of these events and seminars? You are a startup with almost no reputation and you want to deal with those big guys “business customers”? Then you need reputation first. As a guy said above (srr I’m lazy to scroll up), your team don’t know what is different between PR and marketing, especially digital marketing. Please hire a digital marketing leader, or even outsource it, please the one who can run ads. Someone who would STOP the OP to open a thread like this because it definitely hurts the company reputation. Lol.
Second. About the business model I think you guys suck with making money because some reasons:
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Pricing model: Storj charges too less for disk space but too much for bandwidth, which will make it only usable for backup storage, not for production/daily use. That makes all good points about speed and security…blah blah… seem useless. Please charge more for disk space and less for bandwidth.
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STORJ coin is only used for SNO paying. People will cash it out right after receiving. So what’s the point of using the coin? People won’t hold it, there’s always one direction for STORJ on the market: SELLING. You guys only think STORJ coin is a payment method. But it’s not, you’re a cryptocurrency related startup, even if you want or not, you like it or not, then people will see STORJ coin price as an indice of how you doing your business. If the STORJ coin goes down then people will see Storj a bad business. It’s some kind of traditional stock price here. Keep the coin price up, keep your reputation.
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You guys need developers for end-user products. If you call yourself a “platform” and don’t want to deal with customer problems then go get more developers. They’ll build their products, sell products and deal with the customers. And more marketing towards the developers, please.
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SNOs are your partners. Please remember this. If you lose your SNO’s love then they will go and never comeback.
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I’m sorry, but your post is simply riddled with inaccuracies. Storj does run ads. You’re probably not in their target group. Storj is object storage for developers. I have my doubts you actually see ads from their competition unless you are a developer yourself, you probably have the wrong idea about what their competition is. Developers are at seminars and yes, they tend to be business customers, but they don’t have to be big guys. They already mentioned they have an experience marketing team… so…
I think you may have skipped a few…
Compared to their competition they already charge less for bandwidth relative to storage. So this just tells me even more that you don’t realize what their actual competition is.
It’s a utility token, but no, it’s not only used for payouts. You can pay for the service with the token too and you will get 10% bonus if you do.
Those people would be wrong. As I said before, it’s a utility token and doesn’t represent the value of the business at all. It’s nothing like a stock price, it doesn’t imply ownership, nor does it move with the company value. I don’t know what to tell you, but you’re just wrong about what the token is and does. Also… definitely not everyone cashes out right away, but that’s kind of beside the point. The reason it’s there is to make it easy for Storj to send payouts to a global network of node operators without having to deal with every individual countries banking system, including countries that don’t even have a central banking system. If you want to be truly global, you need to have a truly global payment system.
That’s literally what nearly all their customers are. There already are consumer applications built on Storj.
No argument here. But having been in all twitter spaces and read all posts by Storj leadership, I can assure you they are very aware of this.
And that’s where I want to get back to this point. You do realize that you are literally advocating for them to leave their partners (your word) in the dark. It doesn’t hurt the company reputation to be transparent. Which they’ve luckily always tried to be. We should encourage more transparency, not less. It is important to not screw over node operators. If they didn’t warn beforehand, the discussion that follows would just be node operators complaining about the sudden surprise and lost investments. THAT is what ruins reputations.
Ps. If you enjoy reading long threads, you haven’t seen nothing yet. This upcoming changes have been discussed extensively since November here: Let's talk about the elephant in the room: The Storj economic model (node operator payout model)
And that wasn’t the first time Storj has mentioned them either. So this top post wasn’t really that much of a surprise to most people on this forum.
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I agree with everything except this statement. These corporate policies already make you want to puke: everything is fine, flowers are blooming in the gardens, money flows like a river, and in the morning you wake up - and your token is worth 0 (hello LUNA and FTX). The fact that the developers came to the community and honestly told about their problems is a big plus. The community gave them feedback and their opinion, and now it’s up to them whether to follow the advice or continue working in the same way.
At least, their entire business is based on the sale of their own token according to the scheme - to take fiat money from the client and pay off the contractors with a token that they got for free (without taking into account the costs of maintaining the project).
The bad thing is that without developing services and without a finished product, no one knows if the company really has customers or if they are just selling their token to the market. You can say as much as you like - we have business clients, we cannot disclose them for privacy reasons. But it is impossible to really check it. Network statistics can be easily falsified if the network feeds random data to operators under the guise of customer data.
Although I don’t see anything wrong with that either - the miners earn money, the team earns money and everyone is happy.
But Uber never came to the drivers and said “don’t buy new cars - we have nothing to pay with.” On the contrary, they called for bringing their friends and acquaintances to the service, and personally I didn’t know anyone who didn’t use Uber (well, except for old people). And here, on the contrary, I do not see the real integration of STORJ into projects (well, Filezilla and Duplicatti do not count), I do not see STORJ inscriptions on the websites of large companies, and I have to believe the developers’ words that they really have customers. I think we all understand everything, and have already spoken out enough on this topic - now it’s the team’s turn to make a move.
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The tokens have been mined beforehand, that was definitely not for free. Customers can also pay with tokens and even get 10% bonus.
With this much criminal intend that you’re implying they wouldn’t have bothered to even create a working piece of code. As a SNO you also see your own statistics. Are these faked too? And you also get paid according the faked statistics that somehow match you setup. That is a lot of effort. Sarkasm aside, look through the announcements there are some about business clients there. If the businesses don’t want to announce their cooperation than there is not much to do. I also don’t see many companies announce that they store their data on S3, although many do.
Again, SNOs are not miners.
Well, that’s not exactly true. I have already said that I am connected with IT marketing for all my life, and I constantly receive press releases from Cloud providers, which indicate which large company or government organization “took advantage of our super-modern solutions and moved its infrastructure to our cloud.”
Yes, maybe not every customer is eager to tell where he bought hosting, but for this there is a PR department that convinces him to do it. Discounts, bonuses, but get a press release.
And so, for reference, the business of Cloud providers is the toughest from the point of view of PR of all that I have seen. Even oil companies are less scrupulous about PR than Cloud companies. There is such control, there is such feedback from publications that the CIA probably has less. Nevertheless, people find an opportunity to build their PR strategy and marketing.
Bro thank you for your reply.
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I really read posts. But because my bad English I don’t think I understand them all. Sorry for that. That long a$$ thread with more than 500 replies. Omg.
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About the marketing, you can make a poll for this. Let people vote if they think Storj marketing is good and enough. Let them tell us if they ever seen a Storj ads on search engine or social network. This may varies on geolocation but overall I don’t think it’s enough, neither good executed.
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For pricing model, by what you saying here I think Storj is aiming to be a competitor of AWS S3, Azure, Wasabi… But bro. that cloud storage for business users market is almost saturated. We will just have 2 cases now:
- Big ass fish, they already using one cloud storage service like S3. For these guys the pricing model is acceptable/cheap for them. But they won’t move! Don’t expect them to think “ah! I can migrate to this brand new service to save $10k per month FOR MY BOSS”. For this size of business then the cost is nothing compared to stability. It’s not easy to build a system and make it working from scratch.
- Small size fish like new comers, startup, individual developer… I think this is what you guys should focus on instead of finding the big fish. And for these guys your pricing model is quite…not good. They don’t need that much disk space, they need bandwidth.
As I said before, it’s a utility token and doesn’t represent the value of the business at all. It’s nothing like a stock price, it doesn’t imply ownership, nor does it move with the company value.
I know it. But most people don’t. And they have reasons for that. Again, make a poll and you’ll see. Many SNO holding Storj for a reason. Ask them!
- Storj don’t have enough reputation in the developer space.
So. What I suggest is:
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Free plan that anyone can join should a more strict condition to join. At least a valid phone number for verification. Or a Github student pack. You are wasting your resources here. Make it 50GB storage and 250GB bandwidth. Why the hell the bandwidth is equal to disk space? Normally for a storage service, the bandwidth should x2 or x3 the disk space.
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A sponsored pack for startups, for individual bloggers, key influencers in IT services, developers… You even need to pay these guys for a product review. Go sponsor those Youtubers man.
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For business users: higher disk space cost + lower bandwidth cost. $4/mo is dirty cheap. $5.5-$6 is a good starting point. Your tech is awesome. You guys DON’T NEED TO BE CHEAP. Create more plans to choose. And the first 1TB bw should be free.
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The coin price is important to keep your business up. If you don’t want to keep it up then delete it, because most people will look into it(you still don’t trust me? go make a poll). If you want to keep the coin then remove the payment via CC and increase the bonus for deposit via STORJ token. If the price goes up then your team will get more liquidity which equals more time. And SNOs are very happy to see it.
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I don’t say that we don’t need transparency. Transparency is very good. But not with that title. “please don’t buy anything”. People don’t even read the content you know. If I’m a customer and I see that kind of title then I’ll get away before reading anything. Very bad choice of words.
I love this project. Been a SNO for 2 years. Awesome tech. Don’t let it die. Thank you!
Storj is and will remain an ERC20 token on ETH
It seems you’ve already had your answers to this question in your previous thread
I respect your personal preferences but this is not the correct location to keep promoting other chains.
Noted. I’ll be a little kinder 
That’s like asking every day people whether they thing string theory is real. Most people answering that poll will not have to information to make a correct judgement on that. Honestly, I couldn’t answer that question based on what I’ve seen. So the results will simply be meaningless. Since this marketing consists of a lot of B2B, which isn’t visible. But we can see there is exponential growth in storage usage on the network. That’s gotta count for something.
It’s one of the fastest growing segments with new potential customers popping up every day. Big fish may be harder to convert right now, but as the platform grows and the brand becomes more known, that will get easier.
There is a difference between holding for a good value to cash out and thinking the value is tied to the company’s value or reputation. I think you’ll find most people in this community are very well aware the latter is not the case. Storj Labs reiterates that quite frequently as well. So even if some people still think it is tied, they’ll be corrected by others. Like I did in my previous post.
Verification or tying to an identity of any kind is tricky. There is a reason Storj allows payment with tokens as it can keep customers anonymous if they want to be. These customers need to test the service too. That said, they’ve already mentioned in the long 500 posts topic that their free tier is probably too generous and I expect them to make changes there at some point.
This would be a MORE expensive free tier. Not less. Bandwidth is expensive and Storj has to pay for the bandwidth used by the gateway MT. As I mentioned before, they are already charging less relative to storage compared to competitors. And even consumer facing services often have a download limit equal to storage size. It’s just not usually mentioned as most people won’t hit that anyway. I don’t know where your x2/x3 numbers come from, but I’m not aware of any services that work like that.
Not a bad idea if they could reach the right people for this. I agree. It’s possible some of that is already being done though. I mostly wouldn’t see that if they did.
Removing CC option would lose them a lot of customers. That’s really not an option. It would be nice if they increased the bonus for token usage, but that costs money and it’s already hard enough to make unit economics work out in a profitable way.
I guess the title could be phrased better. But it is actually a selling point as well. You like polls, so I’ll mention a poll Storj did among node operators. It turns out 70% is using repurposed hardware, keeping old hardware out of landfills and many of those are running on devices that would have been online anyway (me included). This makes Storj one of the most environmentally friendly storage networks.
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Thanks for your reply man. I’m still consist with the idea of higher charge for disk space + lower charge for bandwidth. We could do the same for SNO. I think $1.5/TB is way too low and $20/TB for bandwidth is too high. We need a more balanced pricing model.