rsync.net is expensive because they are more of a "cold-storage be-all and end-all" data sink. Their backend is AWS, and so the cost reflects that. I might be wrong on this, but I think they use Glacier.

Here, we are pretty much providing a datacenter hookup for your hard-drive. If that hard-drive fails, we can ship it to you for recovery, but that's on you.

The idea for this site is that most people with ZFS pools already have a mirror/RAIDZ setup at home, and would enjoy the peace of mind if they had one-extra data-sink to send their snapshots.

Therefore, true data-loss will occur if:

  * Their house burns down

  * AND the remote zfs.rent hard drive fails

...all at the same time.

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Personally, I live about 20 minutes aways from my parents' house. I have two separate ZPools (one for my place, one for theirs). I sync the two every time I visit.

I wanted an extra cloud machine to sync to once a week or so -- you know, in case Northern California fires really get out-of-hand :/

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EDIT: I went to rsync.net just to double-check. It looks like they are running their own infrastructure now.

https://www.rsync.net/products/locations.html

Maybe my memory is going haywire, but I swear I remembered reading that they used AWS as their backend.

"Their backend is AWS, and so the cost reflects that."

A few things ...

I love your website and domain name, etc. I wish more people operated like this.

I want very much not to mention, or have anyone else discuss, (other competitors) because this is your HN frontpage day.

... so I will just quickly clarify: rsync.net (which predates AWS) has always run on our own hardware that we assemble ourselves. Also, we have no cold storage option or functions - we only provide live, online, random access storage.

... and now let's return to zfs.rent and their day in the sun :)

Ooh I'm starstruck - Yeah, I confused rsync.net with tarsnap oof my bad haha. My apologies

Thanks for acknowledging your mistake. I also have a tendency to conflate rsync.net and tarsnap as I believe I learned about them at about the same time. This is despite having 2 clients to whom I have recommended rsync.net and whose backup I check each and every day.

You might not fully appreciate how graciously rsync handled this: they could have trivially won a lawsuit against you. Had you made this kind of mistake about another company’s offering, and they discovered it, you might expect to hear from lawyers very quickly.

Avoid making comments about competitors unless you are certain it is the truth.

What lawsuit could they trivially win for an internet comment saying "their backend is AWS"?

Perhaps you're confusing rsync.net with tarsnap? When I compared services for my personal off-site backup I came across Tarsnap and their AWS-based infra as well.

I ended up using rsync.net with borgbackup.

Yuppp, I mangled tarsnap and rsync.net in my head

Am I right in say this would be ideal to host someting like Subsonic/Navidrome on?

> a Hetzner storage box

I think the better comparison would be an SX-line dedicated server from Hetzner [0] and this server isn't too far off that.

This service: $10 for 8TB, or $1.25/TB.

Hetzner SX62: 64€ for 40TB, or €1.6/TB ($1.9 USD).

> rsync.net

Rsync.net is ridiculously overpriced. Even at their cheapest tier, 1TBmonth costs $15, for which you can buy 7.9TB at Hetzner. Even if you created 3 redundant copies at Hetzner, you'd be paying only half what rsync.net would charge.

[0]: https://www.hetzner.com/de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-sx?co...

I think you're selling rsync.net a little short here. I'm not aware of another service that offers a turnkey remote full filesystem (ie not just an object store) that you can access over SSH.

Your Hetzner numbers are impressive, but I don't think there's anything available in the US for a similar cost. Most block storage I've seen is ~$10/mo/TB. I would love to be proven wrong on that.

> I'm not aware of another service that offers a turnkey remote full filesystem (ie not just an object store) that you can access over SSH.

I know it's not what you meant but keep in mind that as-described, that's every single server provider.

And I think including what you meant (e.g. ZFS set up), it's literally a one-line command to create a new zpool on a new server.

I'm not saying that rsync.net is worthless but it's certainly not worth the price it's charging for anyone who cares about the price.

> Your Hetzner numbers are impressive, but I don't think there's anything available in the US for a similar cost.

When I was in the US I came to the same conclusion, so went with colocation.

However OVH has a datacenter just over the border in Canada and its brands Kimsufi, SoYouStart and OVH [0-2] can get you down to $5/TBmonth.

And it looks like they actually have a couple of US datacenters now, which is new. A quick look shows that you can get a 16TB server for $92/month [3], which is $5.75/TBmonth.

But overall it looks like the dedicated server market in the US is still super expensive. You can always keep your bulk data in Europe.

[0]: https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/servers.xml

[1]: https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/

[2]: https://us.ovhcloud.com/

[3]: https://us.ovhcloud.com/bare-metal/advance/adv-stor-1/

I think you have a different idea of "turnkey" than I do. For me, having an OVH account, provisioning a VM, setting up the user account, hardening the server, managing backups, etc etc doesn't count.

They charge $5/TB for traffic over initial 1 TB free, and Hetzner charges $1/TB over initial 20TB free, so doesn't make sense to use them as a web server. BTW, Hetzner also has storage servers - 40TB for 64 euro, which is only slightly more expensive per TB.

>1. This seems very, very cheap per-TB compared to other hosted storage. Are you making any compromises here that your users should know about? How do you explain the price difference between this and, for example, a Hetzner storage box or rsync.net?

The compromises seem to be spelled out in the description in a fairly straight forward manner. There isn't flexibility beyond 8TB storage blocks, and it defaults to just one which in my opinion is fairly useless for ZFS, you lose some of the real self-healing and safety advantages (yeah you can have copies within a single drive, but that halves/thirds your space just like a mirror and it'll be slower and with less redundancy than just two half sized drives in a mirror). So basically double or more the pricing there. The data transfer limits and pricing on that is also somewhat higher, so not for high churn. I'm assuming that "1 TB included" is per month, so for offsite replication essentially there'd be a "loading fee" per drive, then bandwidth is covered going forward if churn is less than 1 TB/month. And even in the best case they don't claim you'd be able to saturate even 1 Gbps, so loading will take a while. At 100 Mbps bringing an 8 TB pool to ~3/4 would take around 6 days. There is no SLA, appears to be no autobackups or anything like that.

The pricing could use some more clarity too. Under rent-to-own for example, it's not clear what the pricing is after you have covered the drive(s). Not clear what payments they take and through what service. I wouldn't personally put keys there either, but since ZFS supports raw send/receive there is less need to trust the far side unless your metadata is sensitive as well.

So basically it's ultra bare bones, for cheap.

Which isn't a bad thing to have in the mix. I'm happy to see more space for people to experiment with very minimal focused efforts that lean more heavily on ZFS itself to try to economize vs traditional models. Personally, right now this is still a bit farther on the rough side of the line then I'd feel comfortable with (I'd want to at least have a vague idea of who they were and where exactly the data center in question is). But the basic idea is a neat one, amortizing something someone wanted to do anyway.

From the description it seems there is no backup or redundancy.