I have no use for this service but i definitely like your text centered websites. Right to the point, no disturbing and useless images or graphics. Thanks, that was a breath of a fresh air.
I like the text centered layout too, but in general I have a problem with sites not having a "legal notice", giving me a quick overview who is behind the site and service. In Germany a "legal notice" is enforced by law and this is a good thing.
There is no reason for a reputable professional data center operator to stay anonymous and not disclose a business mailing address or applicable jurisdiction.
But then again, you are free to upload 8TB of your data to an anonymous website that was created this morning.
I heard the same thing about private WHOIS data a decade ago, and this year, despite all registrars offering WHOIS privacy by default and most for free.
I don't think your point is valid.
> But then again, you are free to upload 8TB of your data
Exactly, let the market do whatever it wants. And of course I don't mind you discussing your own predilections and why you wouldn't use it, but the broad blanket statement is just naive and too simplistic.
That's because domains were increasingly registered to masses of private customers, who should have a different expectation of privacy than businesses. And privacy is a problem here. You cannot enforce a privacy policy (if there only was one) or data protection law against an anonymous website, so expect all your data to go to the highest bidder. Naively, maybe, I would expect that to be unacceptable, although there seem to be people in favour of this. It's possible that you'll get enough data later in the ordering process, but it's still highly unusable (compared to e.g. rsync.net and all the other big clouds).
It's not about commercial, but "geschäftsmäßig" which is a way broader term. Any form of doing things in a repititve form can inder some circumstance fall inter it's this includes non-profit work, can contain hobby things, ...
This is correct. Also everyone using GitHub or similar services and uploading code must also have an impressum on their GitHub profiles. It applies to all kinds of web presences.
Commercial offering encompasses "serving ads", "writing promotional articles for own services or third party services".
It's rather that you don't need an Impressum if and only if the website is neither directly or indirectly linked with a commercial purpose/gain/strategy.
but plain text is better than 99% website's aesthetics, most people just have no idea how to design anything. I think plain text belongs to "outsider art", where a lot of people practicing don't even notice how visually appealing it is (when done right).
The ZFS site is more of a man page vibe to me, rather than retro/90s per se, as it's using some basic bold/underline and not just a pure ASCII doc. Maybe it's just designed for expedience, but I think it's a perfect fit for a service like this.
-_- really? Industrial, UX and UI designers are manipulators now? Is Jony Ive the head manipulator?
There are more ways to communicate than a black and white wall of text. One of them is called language of design. That's why designers use visual language to communicate with their users.
Sorry, I didn't mean to say that all design was manipulative. It's so often abused to hide manipulation though I'd rather just go without and I know I'm not alone.
> UX and UI designers are manipulators now?
of course not, but usually web pages creation is driven by marketing, so in most cases "sell" stuff has much more priority than actual UX/UI. So usually UX scarified for marketing needs (even UX and UI designers gains that).
I find this site much, much less useful than your average image-heavy marketing website.
It completely fails to explain, in simple, general terms, what the hell it is or why I should care.
The first, most prominent item on the page is some numbers that mean nothing to me.
The second item says this is beta, which I don't care about since I don't know what this is.
The third items claims to be the "purpose", which is exactly what I want to know, but the one and only piece of information is a weird command line that, again, means nothing to me.
The fourth item tries to explain what this is, but just goes into a lot of detail when I am still wondering what this is for.
That is, why this site is good. People who know what ZFS is and used it before, also get immediately the point of the site.
This site does not try explain ZFS to newbies, which makes it very concise.
I think it is not the purpose of this site to explain somebody how ZFS works, because this is simply just not done in 2 sentences. You need some hours and days to get the idea of ZFS.
Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.
Every piece of tech is generally worth the time investment, but you have to trust them and start learning the tool before you can realise what it actually does.
Consul is one such case...
Consul is much more than DNS of course, but at the core it's DNS.
Unless you describe it as fancy DNS with extra features, it's description page doesn't make much sense.
>Hashicorp is great but should really start adding some real-world-sysadmin language to their websites.
Oh yes Hashicorp is great please don't get me wrong, but if you just read that landing-page it's like WTF. But if you know what Hashi is doing and read the Documentation just a little bit everything becomes clear...but that page alone just sounds like pure Marketing blabla cloud stuff.
I think engineers know the reputation of hashicorp products at this point. The marketing site is for the C-suite people, documentation is for the technical people.
FWIW, their documentation pages [1] are actually a great landing page for technical readers. The comparison to other software is pretty good for "grounding" consul into your other infra.
I've used Consul, Vault, Vagrant and Terraform so far and all of them are worth the time investment (Nomad is on the todo-list but for personal reasons I cannot play with it right now).
It'd be great if Hashicorp used less marketing bs and provided a clearer description... At first I glanced the Vault description, didn't really understand what it was supposed to do and walked away thinking "I probably don't need it". Which is bad because once I started using it I really loved it.
If you don’t understand it, maybe that was intentional on their part to not do business with you. It’s not a successful path in all cases, but if you have a niche product targeting a small audience, I can see value in what they did.
If you don't understand how you may need their service, you do not need their service. I'd welcome being proven wrong, but I would bet money there's not a single customer they're missing by their current front page.
The only way you, as a person not knowing what ZFS is, would have any use of their service is if you, after explanation, are so motivated to pay them money that you change your own data hosting to match a service you previously didn't know you needed even if stumbling over it.
1. Near-zero conversions. If you aren't already using ZFS, you aren't going to start just to use this service. And If you do use ZFS, you likely know what `zfs send` does.
2. The few conversions that do happen are almost certain to be high-maintenance.
I use ZFS on my NAS at home so presumably I am the target audience. What I failed to learn:
1. What OS is this whole thing running?
2. How many drives do I get? What’s the point of ZFS on a single drive? Is this just a way for me to temporarily hold a file system?
3. I don’t remember all the flags for the various zfs/zpool commands so the example command means little to me. This seems to be the main thing explaining what the service is for, yet I would have to go and look at the man pages to figure out what it does. Best I can tell: I can send my whole filesystem from my local NAS to my drive in the sky, but why would I want to do that?
4. Why do I get root access to the box? And if that’s the case, why do I need it?
5. What are the details of the data center they are in? Or the ___location? Or how did they arrive at their 99.999% reliability?
I have a pretty low attention span, but know the answer to several of those questions without even having to go back to the page (though I will, for the sake of argument). This might not be the case for everyone, but for the way I consume information, the product is described pretty well.
1. What OS is this whole thing running?.
Listed under "storage" section:
OpenZFS + CentOS 8.2 (maintence support until 2029)
OpenZFS + Ubuntu 20.04 (maintence support until 2025)
2. How many drives do I get? What’s the point of ZFS on a single drive? Is this just a way for me to temporarily hold a file system?
Listed under the "storage" section:
We rent out KVM virtual machines with dedicated 8-TB hard drives.
Listed under "pricing model" section:
Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.
3. I don’t remember all the flags for the various zfs/zpool commands so the example command means little to me. This seems to be the main thing explaining what the service is for, yet I would have to go and look at the man pages to figure out what it does. Best I can tell: I can send my whole filesystem from my local NAS to my drive in the sky, but why would I want to do that?
`zfs send` isn't exactly an exotic command, and while I can't blame you for not knowing each and every flag, does that matter? The site clearly states that you have a raw disk passed through to a KVM machine, which is pre-configured in a storage pool, but that you can configure it however you wish.
4. Why do I get root access to the box? And if that’s the case, why do I need it?
I agree that the unmanaged aspect of the service should perhaps be more prominently highlighted, but the site clearly states that you configure the machine however you like. To do that, root access is needed.
5. What are the details of the data center they are in? Or the ___location? Or how did they arrive at their 99.999% reliability?
I agree that more information about the data center would be relevant. The ___location of the DC is listed under "set-up time" section (Sacramento).
The OS options are listed. The pricing is clearly per disk, and "Rent out multiple drives if you wish to create a RAIDZ or Mirror ZPool.". Backup. With root access you can do whatever you want with your system, including (as the page mentions) non-ZFS things.
I know exactly what this service is, but it still took me a minute to figure out what the use case is, and why I'd want it (off site backup; I struggled initially because the focus is on ZFS) - I like the text-based content, but like you I think the copy could clearer.
It works both ways, you don't waste their time if you are not going to be a customer, they don't waste your time if you don't really need their service.
I think the target market is technologically minded people who have servers at home but want a backup in case their house burns down/gets flooded/etc. You can probably also run things like nextcloud from it.
They look like they’re trying to target the raw storage price floor. In such a market support costs could eat them alive.
As a market hypothesis, there are many folks hosting their own media/storage servers for various purposes. Often these servers run zfs and they can’t. Be oushed to the cloud due to inefficient pricing for TB scale, low frequency, low concurrency, moderate latency storage solutions.
Offering raw drives in zfs configs could crack this market, if customers buy into the raw drive solution then they can work on simplifying the solution and educating their audience.
It all made perfect sense to me. I'd argue it did its job very well. If you disagree, it probably didn't make sense to you and doesn't appeal to you and is therefore also doing its job.
Also this https://radious.co/philosophy.txt
I wish such design was usable outside tech community.