7 ms·
S3for.Me – cheap alternative S3 cloud storage
- fiatmoney 13y agoSeems like they should get ready for the trademark infringement letter. Also, the math they use to get their 99.9999% durability is a bit sketchy - that 1% failure rate for a HDD isn't independent of its age, stress level, temperature, batch number, etc., and likely doesn't include the odds of corruption as opposed to failure. At scale you can't simply rely on your vendors' claims.
- hannibal5 13y agoThey say that they store data in three separate servers in two data centers. Three HDD's must fail between two data accesses or scrubs to lose data from HDD failures. For 99.99999% durability their way of doing things is good enough to protect from HDD failures. Of course, there are other failure scenarios.
- pearjuice 13y ago>trademark infringement letter From who exactly?
- aristidb 13y agoAmazon.com, Inc.?
- pearjuice 13y agoThey don't have a trademark on "S3", but on "Amazon S3" (see: https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/ https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/)
- petercooper 13y ago(Potential) infringement doesn't just occur upon verbatim copying of a trademark but also using terms that are similar or confusable with it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusing_similarity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusing_similarity .. For reasons unrelated to the above, it didn't quite go Microsoft's way but consider the Windows vs Lindows case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._Lindows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._Lindows
- pearjuice 13y agoGood point but I doubt such a thing will happen. S3 is a common short-term in bussiness and product names.
- SamanthaGray44 13y agoI'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... http://www.cnn13.com http://www.cnn13.com
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- hannibal5 13y agoAmazon has trademarked names like “Amazon S3”, “AWS”, “Amazon EC2” and “EC2” but not S3 https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/ https://aws.amazon.com/trademark-guidelines/
- aristidb 13y agoDoesn't Trademark law operate on the basis of possible confusion? And I definitely see that risk there. IANAL though.
- phillmv 13y agoS3forme is clearly meant to refer to Amazon S3. If you had lawyers on retainer, why wouldn't you be sending them a strongly worded letter?
- tjbiddle 13y agoPersonally I thought 'S3for.Me' was doing something to resell Amazon S3 at first. I can definitely see how this would cause confusion.
- S3ForMe 13y agoS3 means "Storage Should be Simple" in our case :-) No one has ever contacted us regarding this.
- Keyframe 13y agoOf course, and amazon S3 is also storage, not Audi S3. So you might expect action from them. Play it safe.
- ikkeikke 13y agoThis is clearly a reference to Amazon S3. So much for having a unique name. This sucks.
- dfritsch 13y agoHmmm... Well you may want to actually put that on your website. And you probably want to be careful, since you've posted comments on here like "all the rest documentation can be found at Amazon S3 documentation site, it is basically the same with small differences" and you have "Amazon" on the sign, which is above the "fold" on my screen and pretty much the first connection I made on S3. If your entire website doesn't scream "we are just like Amazon S3" then I must be missing something.
- stewars 13y agoS3 claims 99.999999999 (eleven nines) of durability. This is not comparable S3.
- 3825 13y agoI can claim anything I want and refund you for the time I was offline. How will that help anyone? >We guarantee 99.9999% storage durability and 99.99% availability over a given year. Each byte is stored on three separate servers in two datacenters at the same time to achieve this level. 99.99% means you are violating your promise if you are down for 53 minutes over a given year[0]. What happens when (not if) this happens? If you would credit me back a couple of bucks and call it even, the whole four nine thing is useless. I don't understand the promise of high availability. On one hand it seems difficult to achieve and on the other hand it seems there is not much penalty for failing your promise. [0] (3.15569e7*(100-99.99)/100)/(60)
- zwily 13y agoTrue. On the other hand, S3's record after 7 years has proved to be pretty fantastic, which is even more important.
- sengstrom 13y agoI don't think that is the main problem with that calculation. They assume to know the risk of failure over one year. Having three separate copies would allow you to estimate the risk as they do if they don't intend to monitor failures over shorter times than that (which would be a very very bad idea). Therefore the risk is actually much smaller since one would presume that they do something about it when the first hard drive fails... As noted elsewhere this is hardly the only source of potential data loss however.
- Koulia 13y agoI think the sign picture you guys made looks unprofessional - http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png Otherwise good stuff!
- notmyname 13y agoI'm interested on more detail on this. How does it work? Object storage at scale is not a trivial problem to solve. Are they using their own storage engine or are they using an open-source one? Where are the docs? "Just look at the S3 docs" is a little vague since so much of S3 has to do with AWS product integration rather than just storage (eg billing, regions, identity/ACLs, etc).
- S3ForMe 13y agoWe are using our own self-written software to implement S3 protocol. We do not support all enterprise-features like extended ACL, regions, encryption, this makes our software much simpler and easier to develop. You can find basic documentation here https://my.s3for.me/client/docs/index https://my.s3for.me/client/docs/index, all the rest documentation can be found at Amazon S3 documentation site, it is basically the same with small differences. Edit: can't post comments for some time (You're submitting too fast...), will reply later.
- notmyname 13y agoCan you share more about your implementation? (Disclosure: I'm very interested since I work on OpenStack Swift.) Starter questions: How does data placement work? How is data checked for correctness? How do you do listings at scale? During hardware failures, do you still make any durability or availability guarantees? How do you handle hot content? How do you resolve conflicts (eg concurrent writes)?
- S3ForMe 13y ago> How does data placement work? Each object bigger than some size is split in small parts, these parts are linked to the metadata object with all information, such as name, bucket, size, date, checksum, etc. All data is split in server groups - each group is at least 3 mirrored servers with no more than 5TB of data to make system flexible. Server groups can be added to increase system capacity or removed to decrease. > How is data checked for correctness? With checksum. Once the data is uploaded by user he will receive its checksum and must compared it with local checksum to make sure that it was correctly transfered and stored. The same checksum is used to ensure server-side data correctness. > How do you do listings at scale? There is a trick - we support only one delimiter (/), this means that we can use very simple listing algorithm which scales very easy. > During hardware failures, do you still make any durability or availability guarantees? Yes, all data is split in server groups by 3 servers each. If one of 3 servers will fail, this group will still running like nothing happened, some running requests may fail though. If 2 servers will fail at the same time, then this group and all data in it will be put in read-only mode to avoid any possible data damage. > How do you handle hot content? It is cached in RAM by OS, we do not perform any additional measures. OS does a pretty good job. > How do you resolve conflicts (eg concurrent writes)? Some conflicts are resolved by the software if possible. Unrecoverable conflicts are returned back to user with HTTP 400, 500 errors to make him know that something is wrong and he must run request again. For concurrent writes we use simple rule - the last one wins.
- crucifiction 13y agoLets see, it has less durability, unknown reliability (new company), and is housed in only two data centers in one region. So that means two of your three replicas are probably sitting on a rack right next to each other. I can't imagine why it is marginally cheaper.
- S3ForMe 13y agoPersonally I can't understand why Amazon S3 is so expensive!
- tomphoolery 13y agoLOL wow. This needs to be on @ShitHNSays.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- karl_gluck 13y agoWhere are they located? (Outside of the US?) I can't find anything on their website that lists physical contact information.
- S3ForMe 13y agoOr datacenter is located at Germany
- samstave 13y agoIs this based on Ceph?
- S3ForMe 13y agoNo, we use self-written software, this means that we can fix any issue or add additionally functionality very fast and do not depend on any vendor.
- dap 13y agoYou write your own controller and disk drive firmware? (That's not a facetious question. That was the single biggest source of pain on the storage product I worked on at Sun, and that pain was usually extremely difficult to work around satisfactorily.)
- jauer 13y agoWhich is all well and good if you think you are better than the half-dozen proven open source systems (such as OpenStack Swift) that are in production on large public clouds. Right now you are a unknown player with a unknown product running on top of a bargain-basement server provider. I wish you the best of luck but I'll be surprised if you don't slam into a growth wall and have to raise prices.
- nwilkens 13y agoBoth Ceph (https://github.com/ceph/ceph https://github.com/ceph/ceph) and Openstack Swift (https://github.com/openstack/swift https://github.com/openstack/swift) are open source, allowing you to add functionality and not be dependent on a vendor. I'm sure you still have valid reasons why you rolled your own, and I would be interested in hearing about them.
- NatW 13y agohmm. so if storing/transferring <1TB Amazon (standard): $0.095/GB/mo |transfer out: $0.12/GB/mo S3for.me: $0.060/GB/mo |transfer out: $0.04/GB/mo
- draugadrotten 13y agoAs a European citizen, my first concern for US cloud storage is now a question of confidentiality. This is not mentioned on the site's FAQ. What is S3for.me's policy regarding NSA warrantless surveillance? Will S3for.me release a NSA transparency report, like Yahoo? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_%282001%E2%80%9307%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_%2...
- S3ForMe 13y agoAbsolutely not. edit: I meant that we do not disclose any user-related data to anyone without a court order.
- rmoriz 13y agoS3for.me is hosting at hetzner.de one of the largest german hosting companies. Unfortunately they have to provide a wiretapping API to police, secret service (BND / Bundesnachrichtendienst) and other govermental institutions. They are not allowed to talk about this or risk punishment. Recent developments from Mr. Snowden show, that BND regularly sniffs and provides data to the NSA. If you want to find out more about this, try to find a translation of the TKÜV (Telekommunikations-Überwachungsverordnung). It was established in 2002 http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/BND-ueberwachungsschnittstelle-nimmt-Gestalt-an-59681.html http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/BND-ueberwachungsschn... Update: http://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/Gesetz/TKUEV-deutsch-englisch,property=pdf,bereich=bmwi,sprache=de,rwb=true.pdf http://www.bmwi.de/BMWi/Redaktion/PDF/Gesetz/TKUEV-deutsch-e... The obligated party shall tolerate the installation and operation of equipment of the Federal Intelligence Service in its premises which shall only be installed and serviced by Federal Intelligence Service staff specially authorised and shall meet the following requirements:…
- Miyamoto 13y agoI like how the sign up button appears 5 times. They should A/B test that and see if it works. /s
- S3ForMe 13y agoOur marketing guys said that it is a good idea :-)
- jnardiello 13y ago2 times should be enough. 3 if you really want to make it clear. Marketing guys should burn in hell.
- xur17 13y agoI would seriously reconsider putting that button on a page more than once or twice. It makes it look unprofessional. It looks like an interesting storage service, but like others mentioned, you should consider renaming it. I was convinced you were reselling Amazon S3 storage when I visited the site.
- S3ForMe 13y agoI agree, maybe you can suggest a good name for it?
- rheide 13y agoI'm not sure who this is targeting. As a (very) small-scale user of S3 I hardly pay anything per month and would not even consider switching. Large companies on the other hand need to have the reliability and security of a big name behind the storage. Why would they even consider moving to a no-name company that hasn't proven itself? Sorry, it just seems like the wrong niche to step in to.
- pgroves 13y agoI'm actually facing a decision right now in building a new app that has relatively heavy needs for data storage and number crunching. Each paying customer would have a relatively large amount of data per person compared to your average CRUD app. I'd like to use DigitalOcean or Linode VPS machines for processing and as web servers, but then I need a large object store like S3. Rackspace and AWS have both object storage and VPS, but their VPS machines are underpowered for the price. So ideally I would use Rackspace-Files or Amazon-S3 for storage, and DigitalOcean for number crunching, but I'd get killed on transfer rates from S3 to DigitalOcean (for example). Amazon and Rackspace have a trump card with free data transfer within their data centers. You have to use their slow machines to realistically use their object stores in this type of a use case. So that's the 'S3' problem I need solved, which still isn't quite what S3ForMe is going after. Extremely cheap data transfers to/from major VPS providers.
- gaadd33 13y agoWhy not use Rackspace-Files and get dedicated servers from Rackspace? That would solve your transfer rate issue and likely get you far better performance than Linode or DigitalOcean.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoBecause dedicated servers from Rackspace are expensive.
- danielparks 13y ago
- big_jim_slade 13y agoIf the quality, clarity and thoroughness of the public website is representative of the backend... I shudder to think.
- S3ForMe 13y agoBackend is much better, but the public site must be redesigned, it is awful, I agree.
- Kiro 13y agoWorst name ever but nice service.
- malanj 13y agoIt almost seems more like someone testing out a concept (mockup) than an actual final product. I can't think that those prices/durability promises are realistic unless you're operating at massive scale.
- electic 13y agoSix 9's. Hmm, that is a lot and hard to digest.
- philmcc 13y agoMinor Advice: On your interactive chart, I'd arrange it so s3forme was first or last, and that it was a steadily increasing (or decreasing) value. Also I'd consider changing the font/color on s3forme so that it 'pops' a bit more compared to your competitors. As is my guess is the user's eye is drawn to Rackspace.
- dap 13y agoWhat's the long-term plan for competing with Amazon on price?
- S3ForMe 13y agoOur prices will aways be lower than Amazon S3, I can tell this for sure. But our main advantage is support - you can always open a ticket and get an answer on your question within 24 hours, but usually much faster.
- dap 13y agoPresumably, Amazon gets enormous volume discounts for the disk drives that would be a main cost of running S3, and they run their business with notoriously tiny margins. It would seem nearly impossible to undercut them for the same product at the same level of service.
- ddorian43 13y agowhat about bandwidth price?
- S3ForMe 13y agoRight now it is $0.04 per GB which is 3 times cheaper than Amazon and customers with a lot of traffic will get additional discounts.
- ddorian43 13y agowhat happens if a file becomes very popular? like a ddos or a very popular video how many servers can transmit one file?
- S3ForMe 13y agoEach file is stored at 3 different servers at the same time. Hot files are moved to RAM automatically and will be served very fast without even touching the disks. Our tests shows that each servers group has about 500Mb/s free bandwidth capacity at this time. And it can be increased to several Tb/s in a matter of days if needed. Additional servers will be added in 2-3 days do the server group if necessary.
- gosukiwi 13y agoDoesn't it have a free plan? Like amazon free 5gb storage per month, 15gb transfer.
- joshstrange 13y agoThey give you $50 worth of credit when you sign up.
- hemancuso 13y agoQuestion for the company - why bother writing your own distributed object store when you could use Swift or CEPH?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoOr Riak CS (which a large VM vendor is using to store VM-associated snapshots)
- slynux 13y agoWhy would someone use s3for.me service instead of Mega ? In terms of speed, security and pricing how much worse/better is this service ?
- mdaniel 13y agoLast I checked, Mega does not support the Amazon S3 protocol nor even a RESTful one. IIRC, the majority of Mega magic is done in browser using a ton of JavaScript.
- noir_lord 13y ago99.99 over a year (@365.256 * 86400) is about 52 minutes downtime. I wouldn't want to promise that.
- jnardiello 13y agoAllright, i won't be on the haters and trolls side this time. I'm actually very interested in your product as i was looking for an Amazon S3 replacement. Pro: - Servers are located in Europe (WOOOW, fuck spying govs) Not so good: - I think you had a great idea, got one (maybe 2,3) developers working on it for some time and rolled out this product. Which obviously is quite unfinished (on the business point of view, i have no hint on how the technical side is working as i never used it). So, question for you guys: How the hell invoicing is working? As you could guess most of us work/own companies, we need freaking invoices for every cent we spend. No billing, no invoices, nothing like this in the private area, ideas?
- IgorPartola 13y agoThe US has more legal ability to spy outside the country than inside. If you host in Europe, but do business in the US it is my understanding that both the NSA and the CIA can snoop on you, whereas if you are solely US based, you do not worry about the CIA.
- patmcc 13y agoIt's a double edged sword though. Outside the US you can be spied on, inside the US you can be served a warrant from a US court.
- jnardiello 13y agoConsidering the number of downvotes, i guess at least 3 americans got hurted by my comment. Sorry for this. All i know is that if a business is based in germany accountancy is a lot easier and i might be able to recover VAT and other stuff. US weird invoices cause problems on this side. That said, if i get (as an example) a search warrant from a US court and i'm based in EU, i will simply ignore it. This is quite enough.
- moozeek 13y agoAnonymous domain registration, no about us page, total lack of info about who's behind it = deal breaker BTW: websites hosted by Germans are required to have an imprint ("Impressum") with full contact data incl. phone number.
- haldujai 13y agoSo did you steal all of your website's images or is there some stock image service that has all of these? If it's the latter please share. Yours: http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme1.png http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme1.png Salesforce: http://blog.database.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/intro-db.com_-300x213.png http://blog.database.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/intro-db... Your S3: http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme8.png http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme8.png S3 from 2011: http://themetest.hollywoodtools.com/files/2012/06/s32.png http://themetest.hollywoodtools.com/files/2012/06/s32.png You: http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme6.png http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme6.png Unbrekable IT (2011): http://www.unbreakableit.com/uit/wp-content/themes/unbreakable/a/solutions_uptime.png http://www.unbreakableit.com/uit/wp-content/themes/unbreakab... Your roadmap: http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme4.png Oblaksoft (Nov 2012): http://www.oblaksoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/cloud-choice.png http://www.oblaksoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/cloud-ch... Albeit this following one could be a stock image: Your keyboard: http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme5.jpg http://www.s3for.me/images/s3forme5.jpg Cloudonlinebusiness (2010): http://www.cloudonlinebusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Cloud-fingers-SQ.jpg http://www.cloudonlinebusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/0... Edit: Your TOS is Hetzner's almost verbatim. https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/legal/agb
- justincormack 13y agothe TOS is probably Hetzner's because they are hosting there. The other things on the other hand...
- S3ForMe 13y agoCurrent design was build by developers, not designers and will be renewed once the professional design is ready. We put all our efforts on backend and storage subsystem development and completely forgot about our temporary public website. Site images were taken from various public stock image services, I hope we didn't violate any rights by using these images.
- haldujai 13y agoLike I asked, can you let me know the stock image services you used? I really like that cloud that Salesforce uses and would love to be able to use it myself. Also, if you go to http://rest.s3for.me/ http://rest.s3for.me/ (the URL you use to calculate uptime) the error message in the document tree says 'The AWS Access Key Id you provided does not exist in our records'. You mentioned S3 stands for Storage Should be Simple, what does AWS stand for in your company? Unfortunately cloud software isn't my forte, I would love to know what that acronym stands for. My naivete leads me to believe that your status check is hosted with Amazon, and that your uptime checker would in fact be checking Amazon's uptime but I am surely mistaken.
- mamcx 13y agoWish to see the API before to even try it.
- S3ForMe 13y agoAPI is the same as Amazon S3, you can find documentation here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/APIRest.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/APIRest.html
- 0bp 13y agoSo, there's no company info at the website at all, why should I trust "unknown" to host my data? Who's liable? Do I know you don't run out of business next week?