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Is FTP based storage in demand?
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Is FTP based storage in demand?

sgno1sgno1 Member

Is FTP based storage in demand? And if yes, is it worth starting up something with more competitive than what you see from existing providers?

And what type of things should you consider when building such a service.

Comments

  • eriseris Member

    Skip ftp and start with sftp

  • Pure FTP is a pain (firewall issues like it has always had) and a security hole (plain text auth, etc.) these days - if it is in demand it shouldn't be and you shouldn't encourage it!

    If you are looking to start a storage service you aren't just competing with FTP providers, you are competing with all other storage providers: the various big clouds (relatively expensive but relatively reliable with much redundancy and stable performance) all the way down to cheap storage VPS providers, with dedicated servers with storage arrays and the many S3/similar compatible providers.

    It is only really worth starting something up if you think you have a key selling point that they do not. You won't be the big boys on reliability, stability, & performance, you'll not beat the summer hosts and other too-goo-to-be-true-long-term options on cheap, and almost everyone is looking for the best or the cheapest so there isn't much market in the generic middle ground, so you need a unique selling point for your service to gain any traction.

    @sgno1 said: what type of things should you consider when building such a service

    What can you offer that isn't available elsewhere? Or how will you convince potential customers that your X is more desirable than the Xs offered elsewhere? You'll have significant technical issues scaling up to the point where any profit is worth it or even existent, but you need to sort the “how to actually attract customers” issues just as urgently. The market for storage is saturated enough that you won't attract users just by existing, unless you are dirt cheap but fighting for the lowest end of the market is unlikely to be profitable (or if it is, will the profit be enough to be worth the stress and how long will it take to pay down the initial investment in hardware/other?).

    Thanked by 3ralf bulbasaur sgno1
  • I can report that I tried standing up an FTP service a while back as a part of a suite of products that were hosted (hosted MySQL databases aaS, FTP/SFTP/WebDav, VPN-based access to internally networked VM's, privately-addressed VM's for back-end services, etc). It was pretty slick, tbh, and I was pretty happy with how it went together.

    Analytics told me that the FTP thing was a waste of time. I even did irresponsible things like provided free, instant-on access demo accounts with "unlimited bandwidth". I changed it to be part of the backup solution "every account gets free, 5x your hard drive space in FTP for backups... zero.... there was nothing I could do to drive interest. Couldn't even give it away.

    So, my recommendation, advertise it first and see what you get before you spend a lot of time standing something up. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=CA&q=FTP server this tells me lots

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate
    • Unlimited storage.
    • Free.

    Deep Atlantic Storage did it, can you?

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Careful, you'll be competing with the mighty @ditlev!

    https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/179731/how-to-resell-ftp-space

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