From: info@johncompanies.com To: [me] Subject: rsync.net - New from John, of JohnCompanies...
Dear JohnCompanies Customer,
I am starting a new venture: www.rsync.net.
rsync.net is not part of JohnCompanies, but is a complementary service.
rsync.net is online, geo-redundant, fault tolerant storage. It's a low cost "filesystem in the sky" that you can access from anywhere, and do anything with. While much of our data is expendable (mp3s, isos) we all have a few gigabytes of personal and business data that we _cannot lose_.
What I am most excited about is the open access philosophy of this new venture - let me explain:
What frustrates me most about Internet technology is the closed, proprietary usage and access methods that are continuously forced upon us. Whether it's DRM, proprietary codecs, or a "Windows client as sole means to access", there seems to be an increasing culture of closed systems that force you to adapt the way you do things to their way of thinking.
rsync.net does the opposite. Your rsync.net filesystem is accessed over ftp and ssh, and there are NO LIMITATIONS as to how you can use those two protocols. You can rsync, scp, sftp, or Unison; you can map your filesystem as a drive letter in Windows over ssh or ftp, you can mount your filesystem locally in Unix using sshfs or mirror encrypted volumes over ssh. You can do _whatever you want_. You can also use WebDAV to access your data.
Finally, the same philosophy of customer support and customer protection will be in place at rsync.net. There are no first level techs, and there is no ticket system. You deal with a real engineer, in real time, like real people. There is also a simple, common sense TOS.
Please take a look and let me know what you think. I would be very happy to be able to serve JohnCompanies customers with rsync.net. Please tell everyone you know!
--john
JohnCompanies has been good to me -- they host unto.net at a discount because of my open source development efforts. And I've long wanted something like what he is doing with rsync.net. The idea of universally accessible file storage is appealing. And he's taking the exact right approach by making it as open as possible -- ftp, ssh, rsync, rsync, scp, sftp, and WebDAV.
Pricing starts at $2.00/GB/mo for single-homed storage, and $3.50/GB/mo for storage replicated across data centers. Bandwidth is free.
And I should note that with these guys you do get more than you pay for. JohnCompanies' hosting is very good at competitive rates. And the support is outstanding. Really best-in-class in the small hosting business. Similar to Speakeasy, quality customer support will earn loyal users, repeat business, and referrals. If rsync.net is run as well as JohnCompanies then you can probably count on this new venture to deliver.
This is one of the types of applications that I hope to see people build on top of Amazon S3. By way of comparison, S3 is $0.15/GB/mo and $0.20/GB/mo of data transferred. Seems to me that someone could build an application layer on top of S3 that offers the same services as rsync.net and price it around $0.50/GB/mo, bandwidth included, and still make a profit. Still not quite cheap enough for me to store my music collection online, which would come to about $70/mo for me at that rate, but we're getting close to the nearly-free, ubiquitous, and unlimited storage that is peeking over the horizon.
BTW, I actually do something like this for my own personal use already. I added a 300 GB drive to a Linux box in my apartment and set things up so I could sftp, rsync, sshfs, http, etc., into it. The downside is that, while the data is backed up periodically, it isn't automatically replicated, and access is limited to the abysmal bandwidth a DSL line offers in the U.S. Hosting files offsite would be a welcome change. Particularly if there was an ongoing two-way rsync that kept local and remote copies in parallel. If the price on hosted storage drops to around $30/mo for my needs I'd give it a shot.