and there are few pretty good to start with - like resilience, data distribution, built-in security and data privacy, no data centers - running on spare resources - capacity and processing power - therefore “green” / eco by design, and on top fair price for value.
The fact that Storj dosen’t request a premium for it’s uniqueness seems odd and wrong business aproach, but assuming that there are very smart guys working, I think this is just temporary. I believe that their strategy is first to cut payout prices for SNOs, and have a base price and a base storagenode network from wich they will build the next move: increasing customer prices for base service and extra services. They will increase customer prices for sure, but payouts for SNOs will remain down for a long time, and maybe never go up again.
Surely there are smart guys there, but I believe similarly here (SNOs)
I do not have insights into Storj plans, but if they ask us for feedback - there is a chance it will be taken into account (if it is provided). At the end - at least with the current business model and shape of the network (regardless if they like it or not) - we are the part of this business delivering the core service (storage, bandwidth and power) with all the features Storj has (resilience, data distribution, built-in security and data privacy, “green” / eco by design), which Storj then sells. To make this business running both must co-exist - that’s clear.
So now - I really hope Storj guys are smart enough to balance all variables in this equation in a way that Storj not only exists, but is growing. As I do not have insights into storj internal situations - plans, financials etc. I can only base on information snippets and my point of view to help them find this balance, which I believe will be a real challenge, no matter how smart they are - still they are only ones who have all the information on the table to to it right.
My point is that at the end it does not matter if they cut our (SNO) prices by 1/3 or by half - it is only one of the factors, but not giving a full picture to SNO to decide to either stay or quit - imagine they cut prices by 50%, but at the same time gaining new active customers and at the end node are getting 3x more traffic than today - at the end price is lower, but you earn more…
Regarding competition - there is already a lot and will be more and more every day - just starting the journeys - with high hopes and high capital reserves - they will be selling bellow the service cost - same as you are now - but long term it is a way to nowhere - so really better prioritize other storj features than price in the first place.
Regarding data centers cheaper than SNO model - I have just found this one: tebi.io - data center based, 3 copies resilience - still $28 (1 TB storge, 1 TB transfer)…
We should not forget that Storj is still very small and relatively unknown. Their focus is predominantly on small business and developers at the moment. Because that is what the network is sized for. If you have no wide spread name and no big time references, you can’t just price yourself like you do. This is how every small startup starts out. You basically make a deal they can’t refuse. On top of that, Storj has the challenge to convince people that it’s ok that their data is stored on untrusted node operators with varying setups all around the world. It seems the pricing is currently working for them and raising it now would be a big risk. I think there is a middle ground to be found here. Something probably needs to be done about the cost of edge services. But because of the situation I just described, my suggestion has always been to lower prices for native integrations in conjunction with an additional fee for the use of edge services. That keeps Storj right in the same ballpark as other price competitors and usually even a bit lower.
Well, I don’t know what you mean by eco design. For sure, a data center can be more efficient, unless you take into account that a portion of the resources would be running with or without storj nodes.
As for resilience, I started having some doubts when they dropped russian SNO’s. They can also drop some clients if the US government doesn’t like them.
This is not very Web3 like… decentralized, check; trustless, no check; permissionless, no check.
What would happen to the clients data if the storj team was assassinated by the well known terrorist group AFAS, "Armed Forces Against Storj "?
What would happen to the clients data if the storj team was paid off by the competition to drop the satellites and go live in the Bahamas?
Can the community (SNO’s) rebuild the satellites to allow the clients to be made whole on their data?
Just asking…
FYI at no time did Storj drop russian SNOs. Please check for example http://storjnet.info/ to verify this yourself, you may scroll back to last year and check every month. What we did do is make sure that our network would be resilient in case that internet access would be restricted for any reason in that region. However, if and when sanctions are imposed against any country by the US government, Storj Labs has to comply with them and will do so. In the case of Russia, the current sanctions do not require us to stop payment to Russian storage nodes.
What you described is kind of a drop… though making sure the network stays resilient in case of an internet restriction is a good thing. But anyway, it was not my intention to make you look like bad guys. I understand that you have to comply with whatever the US Government comes up with. I’m just saying this is not a good thing…
I believe Storj’s greatest strength is it’s ability to scale concurrent transfers to maximize any pipe size and do so at the same low cost. You can’t do anything like that on any non-distributed classic data center. They don’t have unlimited bandwidth and if you wanted to maximize what they did have it would cost a small fortune.
Storj should try and find what markets this is beneficial for, and focus there. The competition would only be among other distributed systems which would narrow the options and showcase Storj’s strengths rather than weaknesses.
Of course, this isn’t the only strength and all venues that can gain from Storj vs traditional data storage vendors should be capitalized on. But I think the concurrency is a WOW factor that can open a lot of doors.
I think Storj needs to focus more on the storage node operators with their pricing model. See what we get for free and what costs us, and where the difference lies when compared with datacenter competition.
What is free for me: Traffic. I have an unmetered connection to my home.
What is expensive for me: Disk space (yeah, bla bla only use hardware you have lying around, I do but space is shrinking because I use it, and it’s quite difficult to shrink a Storj node) and electricity.
So as a node operator, I need a payment per TB that I have lying around as wasted disk space, and I have a minimum income per month (around 5USD) under which it is not viable to run my hardware due to extra electricity cost from spinning the disks.
So from my point of view, Storj could profit by making traffic free and paying the node operators more per TB stored. That attracts bandwidth heavy customers that are lured in both by the high bandwidth available and the low bandwidth cost.
Why is there no incentive whatsoever for customers to use a native implementation instead of S3 gateway when this saves Storj all bandwidth cost on the S3 gateway?
Still paying some traffic fee would make sense - in my opinion - in this configuration, as it will make a difference to the network to operate nodes on 5 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s connections - in this scenario higher speed should be rewarded better.
Imagine all the AI rush caused by chatGPT - training AI models requires a lot of data which has to be processed hundreds/thousands of times throughout the model training process and of course the faster the better…
@Knowledge - do you have any numbers to share how storj speed looks next to “classic” data center speeds (e.g. AWS)?
AWS interconnection can reach 100Gbit on big VMs with fast NIC. Fastest official number from STORJ I can remember is 1,2GBit? IOPS is probably even worse because of decentralisation.
But that’s just the point: that sort of bandwidth is only available to “the select few” with very deep pockets when on AWS.
Storj democratises that sort of speed to anyone with a pipe that’s fat enough.
Storj Labs has a number of tools at their disposal to optimize these transfers significantly, depending on the customer use case. If a large customer wanted to work with the company to manage moving huge datasets around, the company would certainly engage with them to find the solution that best fits their needs.
