Does anyone actually have experience with this? It sounds like one of those "there has to be a catch" type services.
Any limits on filetypes? Is there a max size per file? How is the network speed? Do they fire any customers who use too much storage space and/or bandwidth?
What is stopping my company from encrypting our database backups and uploading them to Streem nightly for permanent storage at a fraction of the price of normal offsite backups?
We're limiting filetypes to media files (videos, photos, music, docs), so you can't pipe in petabytes of garbage dumps of random data. So in your case, we wouldn't be able to accept your database backup, but would be fine for your media files.
No max file size limit.
We have CDNs around the world to help with network speeds. Of course, that's a vague answer for now, but we're gathering more data on upload/download speeds as we let more users in and will have more information on this in the near future.
Definitely not planning on firing anyone for using too much. The only case we'd ask someone to stop using our service would be if they're abusing our policies (i.e. 100 people on one account). So far we've been fine with an "expected value" type system -- some people will store/stream a lot, and some won't, but overall it all works out so that the $20/month price point works out just fine.
Thanks for responding. I am just spitting out questions and hypotheticals that jump to mind when a see a service like this offered.
How do you guys limit by file type? I imagine that is is something more advanced than simply looking at the the file extension. But if there is any advanced analysis, how does encryption come into play? Lifehacker suggests users should encrypt their sensitive data before uploading, but will you accept encrypted files? Seems like it would be difficult to impossible to tell the difference between encrypted home video and encrypted database backup.
You're right -- we have an advanced way to actually inspect the file to ensure that it's a valid file. The encryption happens post-check.
Unfortunately, we don't have a way to let you encrypt your data and then upload it up yet (but have a few ideas on how to make this work for the future). Besides, if you did encrypt all your stuff, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of all our media features like video/audio streaming, photo/doc viewer, etc. :).
Fair enough. But you should probably reach out to Lifehacker with a correction to their article. While you guys might not be responsible for what they write, that post is basically an advertisement for your service. Any customer who make a purchase assuming the service is as described by Lifehacker will end up disappointed.
Huh, so I could build a competitor to twitch.tv and host all the media for the website on your servers. Keep the small static html, css, js, swf, etc. files on some other cloud provider.
You'd charge me only $20/month for media storage+streaming and I'll probably only be charged perhaps $30/month from a cloud provider. $20/month for the server just being on and maybe another $10 for the bandwidth of the static files(which would be mostly cached client side after the first couple of heavy usage months).
Maybe another $10 or $20 for the CPU time to make a couple of url-routing decisions server-side; have to maintain my own database of users too.
Probably still much cheaper than whatever twitch.tv currently has to pay.
i think this service is targeted at personal clouds. Hosting some service for thousands of users on it is probably against their terms and you'll be kicked out.
Oh for crying out loud. The number of bytes is unlimited. But the service itself is for storing your media files. The twitch competitor is clearly violating the 'your'.
It sounds like the catch is that you grant them "a royalty-free, transferable, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, list information regarding, edit, translate, distribute, syndicate, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative works of all such User Content"[0].
Perhaps this is the start of a massive stock photo/video company?
Edit:
Or even if it's not the start of such a company, it would look awfully tempting for a company in that space to acquire. Having thousands of terabytes of media data, and the rights to modify and distribute it, can be very valuable.
Yeah, really scary. But just trust them, they are a corporation. Corporations always have the customer's best interest at heart. They aren't about making as much profit as possible...oh wait, yes they are.
Any limits on filetypes? Is there a max size per file? How is the network speed? Do they fire any customers who use too much storage space and/or bandwidth?
What is stopping my company from encrypting our database backups and uploading them to Streem nightly for permanent storage at a fraction of the price of normal offsite backups?