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MR: Fill a hard drive, and have it shipped to you
I'm doing market research to see if anyone would be interested.
The idea is that you would purchase service for a small amount per month, perhaps $5 to $10 USD per month, and be given access to an entire single hard drive. Once you fill that hard drive with data, or at any time you choose otherwise, you can buy the hard drive for what was paid for it plus a small markup (around 5% to 8% or so), and then the hard drive will be packed securely and shipped to you.
Hardware would be a quad-core ARMv7 with 1 gigabyte of ram. You get full root access to it. OS choices would be Linux flavors initially, with more options in the future, although limited by needing to run on an ARM processor. Network connectivity would be unmetered inbound 100mbit (~10 megabytes/sec, this is 1.2 terabytes per day at 100% utilization), with 10 (1 megabyte/sec) megabit outbound. Drives will be NAS offerings from WD and Seagate.
You can take as long as you'd like to fill your drive. Get it filled in 3 days? No problem. Takes you two years? That's fine too. Just pay the $5-$10 monthly fee to keep your drive online. In the event that you cancel service, or what seems to be more likely in the hosting world, you just stop paying: no problem there either. We'll zero out your drive and make it available for another customer.
Maximum turn time for shipping your drive would be three business days. This would be "worst case"; ideally, drives will be shipped out same day if you buy your drive before the shipping cut-off for that day. Yes, international shipping will be available, and yes it will be pricey. But if you're stuck on an extremely slow connection, this might be a rather viable option for you to get a lot of data relatively quickly.
Your thoughts? Hit me with your questions/concerns.
Comments
What location?
Nice thought. But it depends on the market that you are targeting to. There must be low shipping costs + a kind of secure delivery, if the data are personal and not only torrents (I mean of course Linux iso's!)
It'll most likely be southwest United States, either LA or Phoenix, to start.
Shipping costs will be 'direct'; we won't artificially mark them up. The upcharge on purchasing the drive is mostly to cover time/effort of packing and shipping, plus packing materials. Shipping will be via the usual methods (UPS, Fedex, US Postal Service). You'll have full access to the block device, so implementing encryption is an option.
@Damian: That's a good idea but I don't think it would be wise to ship/move the drives. Did you think about using USBs ?
Shipping them should be (relatively) fine. They get shipped to their distributors anyway, what's one more shipment? We'd have the option to purchase shipping insurance with a clause that if you choose to not purchase the insurance, we're not responsible for data loss, but otherwise, I can't say I've had any recent problems with properly packed drive that's been shipped around. "properly packed" is paramount to that, though.
USB might be an option, or even SSDs. USB drives may have difficulty keeping up with a continuous 10 megabyte/sec write (will have to test this). SSDs would negate this issue, but would obviously cost more.
Are these virtualized servers in this theory or dedicated? If they're dedicated, I think we all know how LET is going to see this... $10/m dedicated server
Alternatively, they're going to see $10/m VPS with dedicated storage. I have a feeling that, at least in these parts, you wouldn't get a lot of orders to ship the drives.
Either way you have my attention.
interesting thought, it may work few years back when broadband is pretty bad. but right now I have some doubt it will be as popular as broadband access is getting cheaper and faster everyday, especially in the states.
also most of the download i can see will not really sit well with certain agency. Providing the service in US might be a problem.
Sounds interesting, but what could this be used for aside from backups or torrents? What about people who get 2nd hand drives from a previous customer vs a new drive?
Anyway sounds interesting, and hell yeah I would buy one! Would you do different shipping options such as next day delivery with insurance for those using as backups?
They're dedicated. It's basically a custom Raspberry Pi with a SATA port (or a USB->SATA converter, whichever one works out fast enough and cheap enough) that network boots; you'll get an NFS share on a local server to store the root filesystem, and then the drive will be mounted by default. If you so choose, you can unmount it and encrypt it however you'd like. The 10mbit upstream cap is implemented as somewhat of a deterrent for that. If people really want to use it as a dedicated server, that's fine. It ain't gonna be speedy.
That's fine. The monthly fee more than covers the power/transit/DC costs, so if they want to use it as slow mail server to archive millions of emails for years until the drive dies, it won't cause us a problem.
Thanks for the feedback!
Standard provider rules apply: if you're doing something you shouldn't be, you'll be given ample opportunity to stop doing that, or risk being turned off.
Backups or torrents are the main idea. I'm sure there's other uses.
Reclaimed drives would be wiped via the 7-pass method. Customers signing up would be presented with a statement that they would need to agree to, stating that their drive may or may not be brand new, but will be guaranteed working for the entire time they have service with us.
Yes, it would be planned to have an option for "rush" processing in which it would be ensured that the drive would go out the same day (instead of it being a stated goal). The purchase system will be built to present the customer with the shippers and shipping speed options that they want to use. For example: not extremely critical? Select US Post priority mail, which will be cheapest. Have a server down and need your data immediately? Select UPS or Fedex overnight early AM, and pay the cost.
If 50% of users fill the drive in 3 months. Have you calculated the profit?
The idea is great.
What would happen in that scenario?
+1. Also, I'm sure they'd be cheaper to ship.
Will you guys be doing backups too? As in, what happens during drive failure?
Obviously you're going to have to pay extra if you want the disk after only 3 months of rental.
Yes. The profit is not necessarily made on the hosting itself. The drive replacement cost is the cost that we paid for it, so from our end we'd prefer you fill it in 3 years than in 3 months. That being said, if you do fill it in 3 months, everything has profit built into it, so we wouldn't have a loss anywhere, it just wouldn't be as much of a margin. I have absolutely no interest in selling at a loss (hence why I don't do VPS on LEB/T anymore
).
Thanks for the feedback. In that case, the drive would be replaced and you'll start out with a new, fresh drive.
No, we won't be doing backups; this would preclude the ability to offer it at a low cost. Part of the density is that it doesn't use a "regular" chassis with a "regular" drive controller; we can either offer root access and the ability for encryption on ARM, or we can offer user accounts and a mounted drive on x86. I feel that people would much prefer root and encryption. To that end, only one "device" can be attached to the drive at a time, so we wouldn't be able to back it up. If the drive fails, it will be replaced, and you'll get a new, empty drive.
Buy two services and send data to both; the inbound data is unmetered
Same price. If you sign up for a 1TB drive, and we buy it today for $90, your purchase price will be $90, regardless if you then buy it from us three months later or three years later.
We may consider offering a "payment plan" where you can pay an additional percentage per month on the drive until it's paid for, and then you can claim it at any time. If you choose to claim it before it's paid, you'd only pay the difference remaining. This method wouldn't have refunds associated with it; if you agree to pay for it over 6 months and cancel after two months, the two months paid would be forfeited.
Sounds quite good actually, although for it to work worldwide would be a bit expensive. Then like said the security of shipping a drive in-case god forbid it got lost or damaged. Nothing is impossible even with the best shipping companies unfortunately.
@Damian any relation to Good hosting? You have the same first name.
Indeed. We would default to the shipping insurance option, with a bright red warning if the user chooses to unselect it. It's not going to replace the data or the time, but it would ensure no one loses money and leaves with a bad taste in their mouth.
I'm afraid not. I do a lot of things for/with a lot of companies, some of which are here on LEB/T, most of which are not.
Great idea.
For broken hard drive, you could do like subscription plans.
For example:
Lite: we keep your data for 30 days after shipment
Medium: we keep your data for 180 days after shipment
etc.
Got your foil hat on?
That's Damon
@Damian what hard drive capacities are available? I'm in Indonesia and won't be interested in the shipping stuff due to shipping costs + custom issues. But if it's a large drive at sub-$10/month, the capacity itself may be an alternative for a backup server.
Yep, it's quite stylish
Why give them access to complete version of linux, instead of just file storage platform like Amazon Glacier/S3? Do customers really need the power & performance of the entire linux box? No, they just need storage (for backups to be sent to them).
+1 to the idea!
And what are the legalities around shipping a drive (potentially over the border) that may contain pirated content / cp / illegal material, etc?
I really like this idea since I have a very slow internet connection and downloading games and software is a big problem for me.
a) Ability to buy a disk from Amazon and have it shipped to you. Obviously, you'd charge your 5-8% markup for handling, so no loss. If I'm buying a new external/internal drive, I wouldn't mind having it download said Linux isos before it arrives to me.
b) Insurance option to have the data cloned until delivery in case something goes wrong. Also, you'll need to think of a way to prevent insurance abuse
c) The real problem outside US is upload speed. Maybe you could accept drives from the users like Amazon does.
Because then they can pull data, not just push to it. Having a service that they can only push data to would more or less defeat the point - they might as well just have downloaded/kept it locally then in many cases.
probably not going to be cheap enough for your intended audience
Probably start with 2, 4, 6 TB. Due to the cost, it's not really worthwhile to have smaller drives, unless there's truly demand for it.
That's very pretty.
Because I would imagine that we would get individuals entering tickets like "I want to install obscure unheard-of XYZ backup package that only I will use, can you add it to the filesystem?", or "I want to completely ignore all existing well-vetted backup/storage/transfer systems and roll my own, can you install all of the development tools for the filesystem for me?"
Automation is going to be paramount for this to be a financial success; the only time we'll be able to touch drives is installation and removal (and replacement if one dies).
Thanks for your feedback!
I've bounced this off my attorney and he suggests that safe harbor should cover us, especially if we don't know what's on the drive. We'll never go to extraordinary measures to know what you have on your drive, because frankly, I don't really care what you have on there.
I suppose if they'd want to... we can usually get drives cheaper directly from distributors than "retailers" like Amazon and Newegg and such.
Cloning the data makes us touch the data, which puts a lot of "oops" factor in it. For example, if our clone isn't complete for whatever reason, that makes us rather liable for it. For insurance abuse, we'll need the bad drive back, and serial numbers will be recorded before being sent out and such.
That would pit us against the giant that is Amazon, and we would not come out ahead.