4 ms·

Show HN: SFTP Bridge to S3

15 points by paulhenri_l 2y ago

Hey HN, After seeing all the cool solopreneurs on X I decided to try and see for myself what this is all about. 9 months later here I am with my first project. I decided to scratch my own itch, creating SFTP servers from a simple S3 bucket. I was tired of all my employer's customers asking for SFTP access when all I wanted was to use S3. There I have my lifecycle rules, proper access control, lambda triggers. All the cool stuff. But they keep asking for SFTP and let's be honest SFTP isn't cool. So I created this bridge, they get SFTP, I get modern tech. I hope this tool can help you feel something when using SFTP too. Would love your feedback. Paul-Henri

t0mas88 2y ago
Looks well rounded! Maybe good to explain on the site how it differs from AWSs own offering: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-transfer-for-sftp-fully-managed-sftp-service-for-amazon-s3 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-transfer-for-sftp-f...
- paulhenri_l 2y ago
  Thanks! And good point. I'll add a comparison page on the website. But to answer your question, the main difference is price. AWS Transfer Family was way too expensive for my use case. You have to pay $219 (0.3 * 730) just to get an SFTP endpoint, and then you get billed $0.04 per GB in or out, and that's on top of their usual $0.1 of data transfer fees. For this price, you get more control over the way your users can authenticate; this also means more configuration. Baskt offers mostly the same features. You get an SFTP endpoint in front of your S3 bucket, the ability to easily manage users, and you can leverage the rest of AWS for your file processing thanks to S3 events. It just will not offer as many customization possibilities as AWS. I will soon add some more features, like webhook notifications, the possibility to generate sharing links to upload or download files, and a file explorer. These features should help make Baskt a more complete tool for B2B file sharing than the bare-bones AWS solution.
jaffa2 2y ago
why does it cost so much ? 10 users / 100GB and this is 17$ a month ? We currently run our own SFTP on our 1GB line and I have about 20 sftp users. We transfer only a few gb a month, but every so often we put a few hundred GB on our system for customer to download, so this isn't workble. The built in amazon sftp service looks much better as you only pay for what you use, and it directly with amazon not via some middle man. am i missing something? What i really need is some kind of web front end on our sftp server since we mostly get request from customers that can't use sftp and just want a web front end. I haven't found a good service yet, they all seem to want to 'ingest' all the files into their system, I just need a front end to the files that are already on my disks, to allow multiple downloads etc. My files are typically 1 to 500MB each.
- paulhenri_l 2y ago
  The main thing I had to take into consideration when determining the pricing was concurrent usage. If I offer access to 10 users, I have to provision enough servers to handle the concurrent load of these users. Because of the file processing that's going on, CPU usage can be quite high, which drives the cost up. Also, other companies in the same field usually have plans starting at around $50. Now, from what you are saying, I see that you would need more users but not more concurrent usage. This makes me think that the pricing would be better if it was for concurrent connections rather than users themselves. For example, 10 concurrent connections with 2k max users. This is possible. I wrote a bit below about AWS Transfer Family, and it comes with a fixed price of $0.30 an hour per SFTP endpoint, making it come to $219 a month without data transfer fees. It's actually one of the reasons why I created Baskt. For the web UI, it's on my roadmap and should be the next major feature I will release. I was thinking about integrating it along with the SFTP server by using the same S3-compatible buckets. But you seem to be more looking to keep your own server. I guess you would rather bridge your SFTP server through the Baskt UI?
  - jaffa2 2y ago
    Hi Yes we almost never have 2 or more concurrent users. Our use case is typically 1 time sharing of data e.g we finish a job and output to sftp. Job can be a few gb to a few hundred gb. Customer downloads. Jobs come around every few months. So to be paying recurring fees for a single use seems very expensive. But we are thinking about s3 for longer term storage needs but its a complex setup. If we already used s3 it could Make sense to have the sftp hook on . But now we run our own linux local server connected to TBs of disk space and we just do that. Anything we do will cost more and require learning new technologies and have risks.

15 points by paulhenri_l 2y ago

t0mas88 2y ago

Looks well rounded! Maybe good to explain on the site how it differs from AWSs own offering: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-transfer-for-sftp-fully-managed-sftp-service-for-amazon-s3 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-transfer-for-sftp-f...

paulhenri_l 2y ago
Thanks! And good point. I'll add a comparison page on the website. But to answer your question, the main difference is price. AWS Transfer Family was way too expensive for my use case. You have to pay $219 (0.3 * 730) just to get an SFTP endpoint, and then you get billed $0.04 per GB in or out, and that's on top of their usual $0.1 of data transfer fees. For this price, you get more control over the way your users can authenticate; this also means more configuration. Baskt offers mostly the same features. You get an SFTP endpoint in front of your S3 bucket, the ability to easily manage users, and you can leverage the rest of AWS for your file processing thanks to S3 events. It just will not offer as many customization possibilities as AWS. I will soon add some more features, like webhook notifications, the possibility to generate sharing links to upload or download files, and a file explorer. These features should help make Baskt a more complete tool for B2B file sharing than the bare-bones AWS solution.

jaffa2 2y ago

why does it cost so much ? 10 users / 100GB and this is 17$ a month ? We currently run our own SFTP on our 1GB line and I have about 20 sftp users. We transfer only a few gb a month, but every so often we put a few hundred GB on our system for customer to download, so this isn't workble. The built in amazon sftp service looks much better as you only pay for what you use, and it directly with amazon not via some middle man. am i missing something? What i really need is some kind of web front end on our sftp server since we mostly get request from customers that can't use sftp and just want a web front end. I haven't found a good service yet, they all seem to want to 'ingest' all the files into their system, I just need a front end to the files that are already on my disks, to allow multiple downloads etc. My files are typically 1 to 500MB each.

paulhenri_l 2y ago
The main thing I had to take into consideration when determining the pricing was concurrent usage. If I offer access to 10 users, I have to provision enough servers to handle the concurrent load of these users. Because of the file processing that's going on, CPU usage can be quite high, which drives the cost up. Also, other companies in the same field usually have plans starting at around $50. Now, from what you are saying, I see that you would need more users but not more concurrent usage. This makes me think that the pricing would be better if it was for concurrent connections rather than users themselves. For example, 10 concurrent connections with 2k max users. This is possible. I wrote a bit below about AWS Transfer Family, and it comes with a fixed price of $0.30 an hour per SFTP endpoint, making it come to $219 a month without data transfer fees. It's actually one of the reasons why I created Baskt. For the web UI, it's on my roadmap and should be the next major feature I will release. I was thinking about integrating it along with the SFTP server by using the same S3-compatible buckets. But you seem to be more looking to keep your own server. I guess you would rather bridge your SFTP server through the Baskt UI?
- jaffa2 2y ago
  Hi Yes we almost never have 2 or more concurrent users. Our use case is typically 1 time sharing of data e.g we finish a job and output to sftp. Job can be a few gb to a few hundred gb. Customer downloads. Jobs come around every few months. So to be paying recurring fees for a single use seems very expensive. But we are thinking about s3 for longer term storage needs but its a complex setup. If we already used s3 it could Make sense to have the sftp hook on . But now we run our own linux local server connected to TBs of disk space and we just do that. Anything we do will cost more and require learning new technologies and have risks.