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.

Why would you not want to try to inform people who don't already know that they want your service that your service might actually be useful to them?

If you don't know what ZFS and zfs-snapshots are, you are not the target audience of the service. No sense in trying to explain it.

If you have even the slightest knowledge about zfs-snapshots, the product is self-explanatory.

Because it's an alpha product and they do not want those types of users right now.

They're literally trying to filter out uninformed users.

Customer discrimination is a perfectly valid tactic in certain scenarios. Do you dispute this?

I think it is not the purpose of this site to explain somebody how ZFS works, because this is simply just not done in 2 sentences. You need some hours and days to get the idea of ZFS.

I'm not asking for that, I am asking for a short, clear description of what their service is good for and why I might want it.

It's a 8TB ZFS-formated Drive in a Data-center which you can access over ssh...is everything written.

But if you like Marketing-Sites..please read that:

https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul

And now explain to me what it is please...

It’s funny how “DNS” doesn’t appear anywhere on that page.

In case you're actually fishing for an explanation, Consul is basically a Very Nice™ DNS server for your service infrastructure.

Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.

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.

>Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.

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'm sure it was A/B tested for sales purposes.

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

Yes. I hope I wasn't misunderstood.

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 it, maybe that was intentional on their part to not do business with you. It’s not a successful path in all cases, but if you have a niche product targeting a small audience, I can see value in what they did.

It's axiomatic.

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.

They did that. You're not their target market.

In the same way UI/UX can be used to get novice/ non-technical users into something it can also be used to filter them out.

Because such an explanation will lead to:

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.

I don't think they want to have to spend time doing tech support for people who don't already know what ZFS is.

Bingo haha. That's exactly it. I'm not trying to hide ZFS or simplify it for the end-user. At least not yet.

It's all about creating products that we would want to use. So that's exactly what we did.

If you actually want to learn about ZFS and how it works, there's a submission today on the front page that you should spend some time on

https://www.servethehome.com/an-introduction-to-zfs-a-place-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157491

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?

I have a pretty low attention span, but know the answer to several of those questions without even having to go back to the page (though I will, for the sake of argument). This might not be the case for everyone, but for the way I consume information, the product is described pretty well.

    1. What OS is this whole thing running?.

Listed under "storage" section:

    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?

Listed under the "storage" section:

    We rent out KVM virtual machines with dedicated 8-TB hard drives.

Listed under "pricing model" section:

    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?

`zfs send` isn't exactly an exotic command, and while I can't blame you for not knowing each and every flag, does that matter? The site clearly states that you have a raw disk passed through to a KVM machine, which is pre-configured in a storage pool, but that you can configure it however you wish.

    4. Why do I get root access to the box? And if that’s the case, why do I need it?

I agree that the unmanaged aspect of the service should perhaps be more prominently highlighted, but the site clearly states that you configure the machine however you like. To do that, root access is needed.

    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? 

I agree that more information about the data center would be relevant. The location of the DC is listed under "set-up time" section (Sacramento).

To be honest most of your questions' answers are on the page. Let me answer on them, if you don't bother reading the page :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is some value in actually telling me that in your short, succinct explanation of what your service is, as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why not tell people that, then?

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.

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.

How is that related to the text-only style?

What's the point of style if your substances is not doing its job?

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.

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.