Hi! We are currently working on a _simple_ account management portal backed by our PostgreSQL instance. This will print out a monthly table with your bandwidth usage/quota and provide a Web Interface + API to purchase more bandwidth, add drives, etc. Our design is API first, with a simple wrapper around the API as our Web UI. They both will be well-documented and functionally the same.

This Hacker News soft launch was mainly to see if we could generate enough users to purchase a second and third server and scale-out. And by the looks of it, we can!

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As for downloading large files directly to the instance, I'm with you 100%. That's exactly one one of the use cases. (I'm looking at you: massive linux ISOs and +30 GB Xilinx toolchains.) Personally, I like to download them first to a remote machine (takes about 5-10 minutes for 30 GB) and slowly rsync them to my local dev machine with `rsync --partial --bwlimit=10M`.

Think of this service as $5/month DigitalOcean VPS, but it happens to have a hefty native storage unit passed through.

You can SSH into it and do whatever you want with it. In fact, you don't even have to run ZFS. You could run any filesystem -- EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, etc. Compute-wise, it's not going to be anything groundbreaking -- just a 16-core Ryzen 3700 with a couple of cores passed through to you. Ryzen CPUs support ECC and are still priced as consumer-CPUs which is fantastic.

The nice thing about KVM is that even if you don't explicity allocate CPU resources, if the guest machine needs to burst compute, it will "Steal time" from the hypervisor as long as there is extra headroom. This isn't the case with RAM. (For RAM, whatever you set, that is the hard maximum limit.)

Just curious if you've looked at cost for Threadripper for the extra PCIe lanes. There's definitely a premium over mainstream processors, but they're also cheaper than server SKUs.

Generally I find the threadripper not worth it. Radically less motherboard selection, radically less chassis options, half the bandwidth, less pci-e, and near zero price savings.

I looked recently and found the epyc and TR motherboards from the same manufacturer within $1.00. The Epyc 7302P cost $450 for the CPU, cheaper than any TR. Sure TR has some options with higher clock speeds, but generally that's less useful for fileservers.

Generally TR made sense ... before AMD brought out the single socket Epycs.

Also, I can enable IPv6. I think we get a block of /64 of IPv6 for every IPv4 address. Most people are worried about getting their hands on a dedicated IPv4 address (~$1/month @ most co-locations) so that's what I mentioned.

> Also, your page lists IPv4 but not IPv6. Any word on IPv6?

You could use TunnelBroker.net on top to get IPv6 if they don’t offer it and your use case requires it.