Friday, November 28th, 2020 --------------------------- Hi all, We hope everyone in the states had a cheerful Thanksgiving! We know it's been a long week and a half since we first posted on HN and we appreciate you bearing with us. As soon as this email goes out, we will go through each individual email, answer your questions, and relay your position in the beta queue. Quick stats: * About 170 requests. * 30% want to rent. * 60% want to rent-to-own. * 10% want to bring their own drive. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ tl;dr summary: 1. We will be accepting users on a rolling FIFO basis. We are limiting the first server chassis to 15 drives. Invoices will be sent out in order, based on the email timestamp. You have 3 days to pay your invoice; if you do not pay, then we will move to the next potential user until all 15 slots are filled. Tentatively, we will be out of beta in January 2021, which means we will have enough surplus drives to automatically enroll users without a manual human-processed queue. 2. We have created a Terms and Conditions + Service Level Agreement (SLA) * https://zfs.rent/terms-of-service.txt * Some potential users wanted to know who was behind the service, for liability and credibility reasons, as well as which datacenter was being used. We have outlined this below. 3. The pricing model has been revamped and clarified. * See https://zfs.rent/pricing.html for details. * The default drive is still one physical 8-TB drive. * 1-TB of base-bandwidth is still included in all plans. * $10 per drive-slot + $10 per rent or rent-to-own drive. * Additional bandwidth is a credit-based system that rolls over, similar to cell phone plans that sell minutes/texts in packages. 4. We have introduced a low-cost "trial" plan that offers a 1-TB for $10/month flat. This is a virtual drive (QEMU raw .img file) located on a shared physical drive (as opposed to the default, single physical 8-TB drive). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. Rolling out beta users We've locked down a contract with our datacenter. We are going to start with a 15-drive system. Ideally, we will get an even blend of rent, rent-to-own, and bring-your-own-device users. From then on out, we will try to roll out a 30-drive chassis every week until demand has been met. If you are one of the first 15 users, we anticipate that you will be online before December 10th. Hence, we have pro-rated the first invoice to 21 days. For all plans, this amounts to $14 ($20/month * 21/30). If we are online before December 10th, then the free service is on us :) We will initialize a separate system to handle the 1-TB "trial" users. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2. Terms of Service + SLA As per request, we have laid out a concrete Terms of Service and SLA. The main take-aways are: a) Don't do anything illegal. b) This service is cheap because it is not disk-redundant. Competing services such as DigitalOcean ($800/8-TB/month SSD) and rsync.net ($200/8-TB/month hard-drive) are costly because they offer hardware and geographical redundancy. The idea behind zfs.rent is that our user-base is savvy enough to tackle redundancy on their own, ala home NAS systems with RAIDZ or ZPool mirrors. They want an easy, reliable datacenter colocation service to host their offsite backups (covering their asses if their home burns down.) About us: a) Radious Subsystems, Inc. is a U.S. corporation founded by Ryan Jacobs (https://notryan.com) in 2019. b) The datacenter being used is DataNOC, located near Sacramento, in Ranch Cordova, CA. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3. Pricing Model https://zfs.rent/pricing.html In order to sustain continued operation, maintenance, and capital outlay costs, we have settled on an updated pricing model. We are comfortable with it, and hope that you find it reasonable too. It's fairly competitive. Once you are enrolled in our invoicing system and pay your first payment, *that is your rate*. The primary reason for modifying our pricing model is the immense capital outlay of purchasing drives. When we initially launched, we only expected to enroll 10 users or so. However, 8-TB drives cost >$150, so 100 users means that $15k is needed to front the cost. So we've decided to increase our rent and rent-to-own drive plans to $240 and divide it by 24 months --> $10 per month for 24 months. Then, by fronting the capital, we are making 50% -- or 25% per year, which we believe to be reasonable. However, that being said, it is still incredibly costly. We strongly encourage users to purchase their drives outright (or source existing, pre-loaded drives) and ship them to our business' UPS mail box. We don't want to be in the lending business; we want to be in the colocation business. *We want to sell drive-slots in a datacenter, i.e. not capital.* But! Cyber Monday is coming up. Newegg is already selling 10-TB WD Elements drives for $150. Purchase a couple of these, shuck them, and ship them to us to load. Your ongoing service cost will be locked in at $10/month/drive. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3. Low-Cost "Trial" - 1-TB for $10/month flat This plan is fairly self-explanatory on the https://zfs.rent/pricing.html page. "Trial" is in quotes because you can actually use this plan indefinitely. This plan includes the virtual drive and the drive-slot itself. It does not include an IPv4 address, but it does include a publicly reachable IPv6 address. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the best, Ryan Jacobs Radious Subsystems, Inc.