Recently I have been taking another look at the services at rsync.net and it got me thinking: what would I do with a lot of storage? What might I want to run with it, if it were fairly cheap?

• Backups are an obvious place to start. Borgbackup makes a pretty compelling option: very bandwidth-efficient thanks to block-level rolling hash dedup, encryption fully on the client side, etc. Borg can run over ssh, though does need a server-side program.
• Nextcloud is another option. With Google Photos getting quite expensive now, if you could have a TB of storage that you control, what might you do with it? Nextcloud also includes IM, video chat, and online document editing similar to Google Docs.
• I’ve written before about the really neat properties of Syncthing: distributed synchronization that needs no server component. It also supports untrusted nodes in the mesh, where all content is encrypted before it reaches them. Sometimes an intermediary node is useful; for instance, if nodes A and C are to sync but are rarely online at the same time, an untrusted node B that is always online can facilitate synchronization. A server with some space could help with this.
• A relay for NNCP or UUCP.
• More broadly, you could self-host your photo or video cllection.

Let’s start taking a look at what’s out there. I’m going to try to focus on things that are unique for some reason: pricing, features, etc. Incidentally, good reviews are hard to find due to the proliferation of affiliate links. I have no affiliate relationships with anyone mentioned here and there are no affiliate links in this post.

I’ll start with the highest-end community and commercial options (though both are quite competitive on price for what they are), and then move on to the cheaper options.

Community option: SDF

SDF is somewhat hard to define. “What is SDF?” could prompt answers like:

• A community-run network offering free Unix shells to the public
• A diverse community of people that connect with unique tools. A social network in the 80s sense, sort of.
• A provider of… let me see… VPN, DSL, and even dialup access.
• An organization that runs various Open Source social network services, including Mastodon, Pixelfed (image sharing), PeerTube (video sharing), WordPress, even Minecraft.
• A provider of various services for a nominal charge: $3/mo gets you access to the MetaArray with 800GB of storage space which you have shell access to, and can store stuff on with Nextcloud, host public webpages, etc.
• Thriving communities around amateur radio, musicians, Plan 9, and even – brace yourself – TOPS-20, a DEC operating system first released in 1976 and not updated since 1988.
• There’s even a Wikipedia article about SDF.

There’s a lot there. SDF lets you use things for yourself, of course, but you can also join a community. It’s not a commercial service backed by SLAs — it’s best-effort — but it’s been around more than 30 years and has a great track record.

Top commercial option for backup storage: rsync.net

rsync.net offers storage broadly over SSH: sftp, rsync, scp, borg, rclone, restic, git-annex, git, and such. You do not get a shell, but you do get to run a few noninteractive commands via ssh. You can, for instance, run git clone on the rsync server.

The rsync special sauce is in ZFS. They run raidz3 on their arrays (and also offer dual location setups for an additional fee), offer both free and paid ZFS snapshots, etc. The service is designed to be extremely reliable, particularly for backups, and it seems to me to meet those goals.

Basic storage is $0.025 per GB/mo, but with certain account types such as borg, can be had for $0.015 per GB/mo. The minimum size is 400GB or $10/mo. There are no bandwidth charges. This makes it quite economical even compared to, say, S3. Additional discounts start at 10TB, so 10TB with rsync.net would cost $204.80/mo or $81.92 on the borg plan.

You won’t run Nextcloud on this thing, but for backups that must be reliable, or even a photo collection or something, it makes perfect sense.

When you look into other options, you’ll find that other providers are a lot more vague about their storage setup than rsync.net.

Various offerings from Hetzner

Hetzner is one of Europe’s large hosting companies, and they have several options of interest.

Their Storage Box competes directly with the rsync.net service. Their per-GB storage cost is lower than rsync.net, and although they do include a certain amount of free bandwidth with each account, bandwidth is not unlimited and could result in charges. Still, if you don’t drive 2x or more your storage usage in bandwidth each month, it would be cheaper than rsync. The Storage Box also uses ZFS with some kind of redundancy, though they don’t specifcy details.

What differentiates them from rsync.net is the protocol support. They support sftp, scp, Borg, ssh, rsync, etc. just as rsync.net does. But then they also throw in Samba/CIFS, FTPS, HTTPS, and WebDAV – all optionally enabled or disabled by you. Although things like sshfs exist, they aren’t particularly optimal for some use cases, and CIFS support may just be what you need in some situations.

10TB with Hetzner would cost EUR 39.90/mo, or about $48.84/mo. (This figure is higher for Europeans, who also have to pay VAT.)

Hetzner also offers a Storage Share, which is a private Nextcloud instance. 10TB of that is exactly the same cost as 10TB of the Storage Box. You can add your own users, groups, etc. to this as your are the Nextcloud admin of your instance. Hetzner throws in automatic updates (which is great, as updates have been a pain in my side for a long time). Nextcloud is ideal for things like photo sharing, even has email and chat built in, etc. For about the same price at 2TB of Google One, you can have 2TB of Nextcloud with all those services for yourself. Not bad. You can also mount a Nextcloud instance with WebDAV.

Interestingly, Nextcloud supports “external storages” as backend for the data. It supports another Nextcloud instance, OpenStack or S3 object storage, and SFTP, SMB/CIFS, and WebDAV. If you’re thinking you’d like both SFTP and Nextcloud access to a pool of storage, I imagine you could always get a large Storage Box from Hetzner (internal transfer is free), pair it with a small Nextcloud instance, and link the two with Nextcloud external storage.

Dedicated Servers

If you want a more DIY approach, you can find some interesting deals on actual dedicated server hardware – you get the entire machine to yourself. I’ve been using OVH’s SoYouStart for a number of years, with good experienaces, and they have a number of server configurations available. For instance, for $45.99, you can get a Xeon box with 4x2TB drives and 32GB RAM. With RAID5 or raidz1, that’s 6TB of available space – and cheaper than the 6TB from rsync.net (though less redundant) plus you get the whole box to yourself too. OVH directly has some more storage servers; for instance, you can get a box with 4x4TB + 1x500GB SSD for $86.75/mo, giving you 12TB available with RAID5/raidz1, plus a 16GB server to do what you want with.

Hetzner also has some larger options available, for instance 2x4TB at EUR39 or 2x8TB at EUR54, both with 64GB of RAM.

Bargain Corner

Yes, you can find 10TB for $25/mo. It’s hosted on ceph, by what appears to be mostly a single person (though with a lot of experience and a fair bit of transparency). You’re not going to have the round-the-clock support experience as with rsync.net, nor its raidz3 level of redundancy – but if you don’t need that, there are quite a few options.

Let’s start with Lima Labs. Yes, 10TB is $25/mo, and they support sftp, rsync, borg, and even NFS mounts on storage backed by Ceph. The owner, Sam, seems to be a nice guy but the service isn’t going to be on the scale of rsync.net or Hetzner. That may or may not be OK for your needs – I mean, you can even get 1TB for $5/mo, so there are some fantastic deals to be had here.

BorgBase does Borg hosting and borg hosting only. You can get 1TB for $6.67/mo or, for instance, 10TB for $53.46. They don’t say much about their infrastructure and it’s hard to get a read on the company, but for Borg backups, it could be a nice option.

Bargain Corner Part 2: Seedboxes

There’s a market out there of companies offering BitTorrent seeding and downloading services. Typically, these services offer you Unix ssh access to a shell, give you a bunch of space on completely non-redundant drives (theory being that the data on them is transient), lots of bandwidth, for a low price. Some people use them for BitTorrent, others for media serving and such.

If you are willing to take the lowest in drive redundancy, there are some deals to be had. Whatbox is a popular leader here, and has an extensive wiki with info. Or you can find some seedbox.io “shared storage” plans – for instance, 12TB for $32.49/mo. But it’s completely non-redundant drives.

Seedbox has a partner company, Walker Servers, with some interesting deals; for instance, 4x8TB for EUR 52.45. Not bad for 24TB usable with RAID5 – but Walker Servers is completely unknown to me and doesn’t publish a phone number. So, YMMV.

Conclusion

I’m sure I’ve left out many quality options here, but hopefully this is enough to lay out a general lay of the land. Leave other suggestions in the comments.