You are free to ignore sites without a legal notice if you have a problem with them, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to stay anonymous.
But then again, you are free to upload 8TB of your data to an anonymous website that was created this morning.
I heard the same thing about private WHOIS data a decade ago, and this year, despite all registrars offering WHOIS privacy by default and most for free.
I don't think your point is valid.
> But then again, you are free to upload 8TB of your data
Exactly, let the market do whatever it wants. And of course I don't mind you discussing your own predilections and why you wouldn't use it, but the broad blanket statement is just naive and too simplistic.
Even if the provider registered a limited company to their name and used that, how would it help? Who would trust such a small entity with their data?
The service is clearly targeted at people who are knowledgeable enough not to upload unencrypted sensitive data.
This is exactly what I am doing then.
but plain text is better than 99% website's aesthetics, most people just have no idea how to design anything. I think plain text belongs to "outsider art", where a lot of people practicing don't even notice how visually appealing it is (when done right).
There are more ways to communicate than a black and white wall of text. One of them is called language of design. That's why designers use visual language to communicate with their users.
Yes. When their hands are guided by PMs and marketing managers they are more often than not.
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.
If you have even the slightest knowledge about zfs-snapshots, the product is self-explanatory.
They're literally trying to filter out uninformed users.
Customer discrimination is a perfectly valid tactic in certain scenarios. Do you dispute this?
But if you like Marketing-Sites..please read that:
https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul
And now explain to me what it is please...
In case you're actually fishing for an explanation, Consul is basically a Very Nice™ DNS server for your service infrastructure.
Every piece of tech is generally worth the time investment, but you have to trust them and start learning the tool before you can realise what it actually does.
Consul is one such case...
Consul is much more than DNS of course, but at the core it's DNS.
Unless you describe it as fancy DNS with extra features, it's description page doesn't make much sense.
Oh yes Hashicorp is great please don't get me wrong, but if you just read that landing-page it's like WTF. But if you know what Hashi is doing and read the Documentation just a little bit everything becomes clear...but that page alone just sounds like pure Marketing blabla cloud stuff.
I think engineers know the reputation of hashicorp products at this point. The marketing site is for the C-suite people, documentation is for the technical people.
FWIW, their documentation pages [1] are actually a great landing page for technical readers. The comparison to other software is pretty good for "grounding" consul into your other infra.
[1]: https://www.consul.io/docs/intro [2]: https://www.consul.io/docs/intro/vs
I've used Consul, Vault, Vagrant and Terraform so far and all of them are worth the time investment (Nomad is on the todo-list but for personal reasons I cannot play with it right now).
It'd be great if Hashicorp used less marketing bs and provided a clearer description... At first I glanced the Vault description, didn't really understand what it was supposed to do and walked away thinking "I probably don't need it". Which is bad because once I started using it I really loved it.
If you don't understand how you may need their service, you do not need their service. I'd welcome being proven wrong, but I would bet money there's not a single customer they're missing by their current front page.
The only way you, as a person not knowing what ZFS is, would have any use of their service is if you, after explanation, are so motivated to pay them money that you change your own data hosting to match a service you previously didn't know you needed even if stumbling over it.
1. Near-zero conversions. If you aren't already using ZFS, you aren't going to start just to use this service. And If you do use ZFS, you likely know what `zfs send` does.
2. The few conversions that do happen are almost certain to be high-maintenance.
It's all about creating products that we would want to use. So that's exactly what we did.
https://www.servethehome.com/an-introduction-to-zfs-a-place-...
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?
1. What OS is this whole thing running?.
OpenZFS + CentOS 8.2 (maintence support until 2029)
OpenZFS + Ubuntu 20.04 (maintence support until 2025)
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?
We rent out KVM virtual machines with dedicated 8-TB hard drives.
Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.
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?
1. It is written on the given website: Centos 8.2 and Ubuntu 20.04
2. As many as 5U server can fit. Each drive is 8TB in passthru mode to your VM.
3. I think they are willing to work with users who know what is ZFS. At least for now.
4. Because it's your box. Do whatever you want.
5. Agree with you on that.
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.
5. is indeed missing.
This service is not for you, move on.
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.
> 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.
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.
Also this https://radious.co/philosophy.txt
I wish such design was usable outside tech community.