No it isn’t. Uber was launched in 2009 and is only turning profitable this year. With a whopping amount of 25.2B collected in funding.
Airbnb launched in 2008 and has posted it’s first profitable year last year with 6.4B collected in funding.
Lyft had yet to become profitable, launched in 2012 and collected 6.4B in funding.
Why these examples? Because they are similar in that they are mediators between suppliers and consumers. These types of businesses typically run on razor thin margins and need a LOT of scale and optimization to eventually become profitable. You don’t get there overnight.
I’m sure you can think of a few other similar style start ups, look it up, find their funding, launch date and profitability. It’s all the same story.
Seeing that there actually are backup programs for Windows that use Storj, the question now is - do we want those users? I am talking about a random person who would use one of the backup programs to back up his data to Storj. Such a use case would result in data that is uploaded and later deleted, but very rarely downloaded.
If we don’t want them, then whatever.
If we want them, then the question becomes is Storj being advertised to them? It is one of the options in those backup programs, how is the user being convinced to choose it over one of the others?
As for companies - I do not know how it works with large companies and how they can be convinced to use Storj instead of Amazon, but I know that for a small company, I would have trouble convincing my boss to use some random small company with a weird business model for storing our data instead of one of the big ones. And even if I did, if there were any problems in the future, I would be blamed for them because “well, you told me they were great, we should have just used Amazon”, while if there were problems with one of the big ones, I could defend by saying “everyone is using Amazon, if Amazon has problems then others would have problems as well”.
Sure, why not? Even Storj Inc.'s worst case of 0.75 USD/TB brings profit to frugal storage node operators, and these customers don’t actually require too much of egress, which is apparently the pain point here. And given backups is one gateway to learn the tech, even more so!
for backups even for enterprise, magnetic tape is most cost effective, it can be up to 580 TB one tape.
You buy a backup robot for tapes, and several tapes, investments only 10-15k but it last for very long time.
Even I use tapes sometimes, though older tech (LTO6 right now), since I cannot afford the brand new tape drives. It’s a bit annoying to use, but once the tape is out of the tape drive, there is no remote access to it, which is nice.
LTO-9 is like 400 MB/s, a single tape can store ~18 TB and costs ~150-200 EUR new. Latency is kinda high though, and the tape itself still gets tangled sometimes.
Yeah, the problem usually is that it has a minimum speed and if the server cannot keep up, the tape then is frequently stopped, rewound and started, increasing the wear on the heads and the tape.
Well at least you take care of your own destruction, no competitors needed.
Egress (per TB)
$20
$1.50 - $5.00
Audit / Repair traffic (per TB)
$10
$1.50 - $5.00
This doesn’t even cover the cost of the traffic, which is roughly at 4$-8$, depending on the country.
Goodbye, bye, bye, bye. Bye, bye, bye.
P.S.: Spoiler, its not so much the SNO side you need to adjust, they’re already underpaid (given you expect any degree of professionalism which is needed to drive costs down in the end), it’s your whole business.
not for long anymore if you execute your suggestions. you need to increase prices, not decrease payouts. and you’re saying this here even though you are admitting you can’t continue as you are. So you’re confirming I am correct, thanks for that.
well there are apparently only numb ears around that topic.
There are multiple ways to survive, but economically, they won’t get around increasing the price which is anyways already price dumping. Roughly by at least 1$ more likely 2$ for the storage.
Further they should really consider stop relying only unprofessional players. You can drastically decrease the piece amount, by enforcing stricter standards, with more attractive payouts.
Also the illusion of free traffic, they really think that this is reliable? Suprise it is not. The price of ISPs are not set in stone and they’re based off a mix calculation. This means you basically make assumptions that you can average out the cost across all customers. Otherwise ISP contracts would be way costlier. ISPs can and will adjust costs if that mixed calculations due to providers like storj become unprofitable for them. (or throttle, every ISP I know has a fair use clause allowing them to intervene if they would need to.)
Also the myth about only egress costs anything and ingress doesn’t. That is not true, that is how major cloud players bill yes, but actually you pay on your maximum throughput, which is viewed duplex, so it doesn’t matter if its going in or out.
There are at least two I would recommend.
First, Iperius. Very easy to use. Yes there is a free version, but after you try it out, go for the paid version. It’s worth it.
Second,
Check out S3 Browser. This offers a folder sync tool. Very powerful. Though a manual process, it is super fast, and will sync your data to Storj.
Both make use of S3 protocols. I strongly recommend setting up your own S3 endpoint. Storj has a great tutorial. It took me about 10 mins to setup. I run this on my storj node.
The token price doesn’t matter, when you pay for the service in STORJ tokens, they are converted to USD on sent date and added to your balance with 10% bonus.
All calculations are made in USD, include storagenode’s payout, STORJ just an utility token to make money transfer simpler, they are not securities and not shares.
The price, or rather the volatility matters in case someone wants to do anything other than convert from some other currency to STORJ tokens and immediately pay for the service, which would be rather inconvenient. Even for a node operator who also uses the service, for the token price to really not matter, he would have to immediately sell the tokens after receiving the payout, then (possible later) buy some of them back to pay for the service.
