Thinking of starting a new file storage business.

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Jared2606

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Feb 22, 2016
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So, as the title states, I want to start a file storage business. I would like to also know if I can store data on multiple nodes in a RAID type of way, so basically a RAID over a network (e.g. a bit of information on one node, and the other bits on the other nodes.). I have already got 10 000 people that said they would sign up, and I am hoping to be able to hold a lot more peoples files.

Internet is a fibre connection with 1GBPS up and 1GBPS down.

I would like to have the servers rackmounted if that is possible.

Edit: I would like backup servers to backup the data daily, and have up to a 5-day backup recovery for each user.

 
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Yeah, it's called Amazon Web Services and a crap load of marketing, more than say Microsoft Sky Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple iCloud. You can not charge enough or grow quickly enough to make this worthwhile. The ship has sailed as they say.
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JamesSneed

JamesSneed

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Oct 26, 2009
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Basically this is what every cloud storage option offers today. Amazon S3, dropbox, google drive, Microsoft OneDrive, iDrive, OneDrive, etc.

Also there are a lot of cloud based backup solutions like carbonite, OpenDrive, SugarSync, mozy, etc.

This is a tough market. I would do a review of all these services and pricing before you invest into this idea so you can get a feel for the competition.
 
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nigelivey

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Dec 6, 2011
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Yeah, it's called Amazon Web Services and a crap load of marketing, more than say Microsoft Sky Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Apple iCloud. You can not charge enough or grow quickly enough to make this worthwhile. The ship has sailed as they say.
 
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Jared2606

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Feb 22, 2016
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I know about these, and I know that the pricing could be lower than mine. I know this is a tough market, but I am willing to try.

The 10 000 customers I have include people I know, and people they know. So they (hopefully) have faith in me. This 10 000 also includes people from businesses (small and big). The businesses are willing to pay quite a bit for storage hosting, and consumers are willing to pay if they are going to get what they are paying for.

So basically, about 2000 people are friends or family or friends of family, and the rest are employees of businesses.

The idea I have is for the businesses to have premium storage on SSDs, and I know SSDs may not come close to the storage capacity of HDDs, but the new samsung 3.8TB SSD is what I'm willing to pay for to make sure these businesses can get their information quickly. Oh, I should also add, these businesses usually do alot of reading and writing to servers, so SSDs might not be optimal for constant read/writes, but I want to make sure that there will be no bottleneck at all.

The consumer side would be to have regular old HHDs, but they must also not let speed be a bottleneck, so 7200rpm drives is what I would like.

The reason I am starting this business is because the people that are willing to sign up would like the benefits I promise them, and would like to access their data that would be stored in the same country that they live in. Btw I live in South Africa.
 
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Jared2606

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Feb 22, 2016
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Well, I want to and have to do this. i have already promised this to my customers and letting them down wouldn't be fair. And also, how the hell did someone else select the solution?
 
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nigelivey

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Not sure there was any point creating a thread if you didn't want answers that you might not like, I don't think anyone has given you poor advise or unfair comments.

This isn't really a start up for someone who asks what to do on Tom's Hardware!

How much storage do you need if your 10,000 prospective clients want 2Gb of storage each?
How much power will it use?
How much heat do you have to shed?
What does your connection cost, not your 1Gbp/s bearer but your failover from a different provider?

I don't think you have thought this through - especially if your business model is based around "friends and family".
 
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Jared2606

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Feb 22, 2016
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I would like as much storage space as possible. Also the clients get 100GB of storage space each, and businesses get atleast 5TB from the lowest package, to 10TB being the highest package.

Power doesn't really need to influence anything here.

I would like the heat to be controlled by the CPU coolers that come with the processor, and I have a 3 air conditioners in the room where I will be placing the servers.

I have 2 connections currently, the one is the 1GBPS connection, with the other one being 400MBPS.
Edit: the 1GBPS is 1GBPS down and 1GBPS up, the 400MBPS is 400MBPS down and 200MBPS up.

Also, it isn't just MY friends and family, it's also friend of my family members (e.g. my brother in laws best friend, his friend, etc)
 
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nigelivey

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I would be very interested in seeing you business plan if you think power isn't an issue, unless you're tapping into the grid for free.
Domestic aircon = humidity.
Dust extraction?
Security?
How have you set up a failover over separate ISPs?
So on a basic package you're looking at 1 Petabyte of data storage being sold to clients, at 10Gb each, you will then have the same in redundancy at another location, preferably in another state or town. Then factor in your lowest package for business at 5 Tb or 10 Tb??????
Lets say a Petabyte
Raw drives = 81,000$
Backblaze solution = 120,000$ ( Rackmounted units)
Amazon S3 (3year) = 2,800,000$

Sorry fella, everything you have said would point to not really knowing what you are doing. There is a reason why people like Dropbox pay Amazon to host there service, it doesn't scale as you might think and growth is the biggest factor in this game. If you can't grow month on month you are going to lose your shirt.
 
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