4 ms·

I find this site much, much less useful than your average image-heavy marketing website. It completely fails to explain, in simple, general terms, what the hel

I find this site much, much less useful than your average image-heavy marketing website. It completely fails to explain, in simple, general terms, what the hell it is or why I should care. The first, most prominent item on the page is some numbers that mean nothing to me. The second item says this is beta, which I don't care about since I don't know what this is. The third items claims to be the "purpose", which is exactly what I want to know, but the one and only piece of information is a weird command line that, again, means nothing to me. The fourth item tries to explain what this is, but just goes into a lot of detail when I am still wondering what this is for. I still don't really know.

moritonal 6y ago
Scammers dumb their emails down to filter their audience to people that don't notice. There's a chance that this service is deliberately makes no sense to you because they don't want you as a customer. This isn't to sound mean! It took a few reads to make sense to me as well.
- biryani_chicken 6y ago
  It works both ways, you don't waste their time if you are not going to be a customer, they don't waste your time if you don't really need their service.
est31 6y ago
I think the target market is technologically minded people who have servers at home but want a backup in case their house burns down/gets flooded/etc. You can probably also run things like nextcloud from it.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Why not tell people that, then?
  - detaro 6y ago
    Especially since this is just starting, it probably makes sense to use understanding of the product description > We rent out KVM virtual machines with dedicated 8-TB hard drives. There is no sharing/over-committing. as a gate. If you don't know what to do with that description, you are probably not a good initial customer.
  - lumost 6y ago
    They look like they’re trying to target the raw storage price floor. In such a market support costs could eat them alive. As a market hypothesis, there are many folks hosting their own media/storage servers for various purposes. Often these servers run zfs and they can’t. Be oushed to the cloud due to inefficient pricing for TB scale, low frequency, low concurrency, moderate latency storage solutions. Offering raw drives in zfs configs could crack this market, if customers buy into the raw drive solution then they can work on simplifying the solution and educating their audience.
Aldipower 6y ago
That is, why this site is good. People who know what ZFS is and used it before, also get immediately the point of the site. This site does not try explain ZFS to newbies, which makes it very concise.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  I use ZFS on my NAS at home so presumably I am the target audience. What I failed to learn: 1. What OS is this whole thing running? 2. How many drives do I get? What’s the point of ZFS on a single drive? Is this just a way for me to temporarily hold a file system? 3. I don’t remember all the flags for the various zfs/zpool commands so the example command means little to me. This seems to be the main thing explaining what the service is for, yet I would have to go and look at the man pages to figure out what it does. Best I can tell: I can send my whole filesystem from my local NAS to my drive in the sky, but why would I want to do that? 4. Why do I get root access to the box? And if that’s the case, why do I need it? 5. What are the details of the data center they are in? Or the location? Or how did they arrive at their 99.999% reliability?
  - detaro 6y ago
    The OS options are listed. The pricing is clearly per disk, and "Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.". Backup. With root access you can do whatever you want with your system, including (as the page mentions) non-ZFS things. 5. is indeed missing.
  - jsjohnst 6y ago
    1. You get to choose Centos 8.x or Ubuntu 20.x for your KVM node 2. They explain you can one or more drives. They intend the product as remote snapshot storage it seems. 3. You might not be the target audience then. Not every company wants to target every possible person willing to pay. 4. As indicated on the page, you need root to provide the encryption key on a reboot. 5. They said Sacramento, but I agree, more details on which DC would be better, for their target audience anyway.
  - JosephRedfern 6y ago
mikkelam 6y ago
How is that related to the text-only style?
- user-the-name 6y ago
  What's the point of style if your substances is not doing its job?
  - grosswait 6y ago
    It all made perfect sense to me. I'd argue it did its job very well. If you disagree, it probably didn't make sense to you and doesn't appeal to you and is therefore also doing its job.
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    When are you going to accept you are not required and ultimately not qualified to understand this? Retreat, man of business. You have lots of useless emails to send today.
  - HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
    The "substances" are working exactly as intended. You are too used to being wanted as a customer everywhere, this time it's not the case.
3np 6y ago
You are clearly not in the target audience and no amount of pictures, showreels, stock photos, flowcharts, emojis or chatbots would change that. This service is not for you, move on.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  There is some value in actually telling me that in your short, succinct explanation of what your service is, as well.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I know exactly what this service is, but it still took me a minute to figure out what the use case is, and why I'd want it (off site backup; I struggled initially because the focus is on ZFS) - I like the text-based content, but like you I think the copy could clearer.

moritonal 6y ago

Scammers dumb their emails down to filter their audience to people that don't notice. There's a chance that this service is deliberately makes no sense to you because they don't want you as a customer. This isn't to sound mean! It took a few reads to make sense to me as well.

biryani_chicken 6y ago
It works both ways, you don't waste their time if you are not going to be a customer, they don't waste your time if you don't really need their service.

est31 6y ago

I think the target market is technologically minded people who have servers at home but want a backup in case their house burns down/gets flooded/etc. You can probably also run things like nextcloud from it.

user-the-name 6y ago
Why not tell people that, then?
- detaro 6y ago
  Especially since this is just starting, it probably makes sense to use understanding of the product description > We rent out KVM virtual machines with dedicated 8-TB hard drives. There is no sharing/over-committing. as a gate. If you don't know what to do with that description, you are probably not a good initial customer.
- lumost 6y ago
  They look like they’re trying to target the raw storage price floor. In such a market support costs could eat them alive. As a market hypothesis, there are many folks hosting their own media/storage servers for various purposes. Often these servers run zfs and they can’t. Be oushed to the cloud due to inefficient pricing for TB scale, low frequency, low concurrency, moderate latency storage solutions. Offering raw drives in zfs configs could crack this market, if customers buy into the raw drive solution then they can work on simplifying the solution and educating their audience.

Aldipower 6y ago

That is, why this site is good. People who know what ZFS is and used it before, also get immediately the point of the site. This site does not try explain ZFS to newbies, which makes it very concise.

IgorPartola 6y ago
I use ZFS on my NAS at home so presumably I am the target audience. What I failed to learn: 1. What OS is this whole thing running? 2. How many drives do I get? What’s the point of ZFS on a single drive? Is this just a way for me to temporarily hold a file system? 3. I don’t remember all the flags for the various zfs/zpool commands so the example command means little to me. This seems to be the main thing explaining what the service is for, yet I would have to go and look at the man pages to figure out what it does. Best I can tell: I can send my whole filesystem from my local NAS to my drive in the sky, but why would I want to do that? 4. Why do I get root access to the box? And if that’s the case, why do I need it? 5. What are the details of the data center they are in? Or the location? Or how did they arrive at their 99.999% reliability?
- detaro 6y ago
  The OS options are listed. The pricing is clearly per disk, and "Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.". Backup. With root access you can do whatever you want with your system, including (as the page mentions) non-ZFS things. 5. is indeed missing.
- jsjohnst 6y ago
  1. You get to choose Centos 8.x or Ubuntu 20.x for your KVM node 2. They explain you can one or more drives. They intend the product as remote snapshot storage it seems. 3. You might not be the target audience then. Not every company wants to target every possible person willing to pay. 4. As indicated on the page, you need root to provide the encryption key on a reboot. 5. They said Sacramento, but I agree, more details on which DC would be better, for their target audience anyway.
- JosephRedfern 6y ago

mikkelam 6y ago

How is that related to the text-only style?

user-the-name 6y ago
What's the point of style if your substances is not doing its job?
- grosswait 6y ago
  It all made perfect sense to me. I'd argue it did its job very well. If you disagree, it probably didn't make sense to you and doesn't appeal to you and is therefore also doing its job.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  When are you going to accept you are not required and ultimately not qualified to understand this? Retreat, man of business. You have lots of useless emails to send today.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  The "substances" are working exactly as intended. You are too used to being wanted as a customer everywhere, this time it's not the case.

3np 6y ago

You are clearly not in the target audience and no amount of pictures, showreels, stock photos, flowcharts, emojis or chatbots would change that. This service is not for you, move on.

user-the-name 6y ago
There is some value in actually telling me that in your short, succinct explanation of what your service is, as well.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I know exactly what this service is, but it still took me a minute to figure out what the use case is, and why I'd want it (off site backup; I struggled initially because the focus is on ZFS) - I like the text-based content, but like you I think the copy could clearer.