50% off storage ($3/TB) at ElfHosted until 2024!
funkypenguin
Services Provider
Hi all,
ElfHosted offers both BYO storage (<3 Hetzner Storageboxes!), and our own, internal "ElfStorage". I've just finished a round of storage (Ceph) refactoring, and in order to provide the necessary resilience for our erasure-coding (EC) pool, I needed to pre-provision 10 storage nodes (8+2).
As a result, I've got a large storage bill coming, with only 10% capacity sold, so I'm throwing a 50% sale on storage until 2024.
If you're looking for cheap (spinning rust), slow-but-reliable storage, now's a good time to pounce.
You'll still get $10 free credit with a new account, giving you plenty of time to play with various app combinations ("kick the tyres"), and any storage purchased during the sale will remain at the sale price, ongoing.
Cheers! D
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Comments
I'm not sure I entirely understand your service offerings. So we purchase the $3/TB storage, but this is only accessible via the paid apps? Which are priced individually?
That's right - the storage is optional (you can also BYO storage, with something like a Hetzner Storagebox or an rclone mount), and attached to the apps, which are billed per-app, per-day, from $0.05/day. So if you wanted NZBGet and Prowlarr for example, you'd subscribe to those. If you then changed your mind, and preferred Deluge and Plex, you'd switch to those.
If you're interested, I have some feedback: I signed up and tried to access my app dashboard. Nothing but 404. I'm dumb and didn't realize that I had to purchase an app subscription before the app dashboard would work. I think the getting started docs cover it, but you might want to add something to the store dashboard next to the app dashboard link, such as "app dashboard unavailable--purchase a sub first!", just so it's less confusing for stupid new users like me.
Once I got in to the app dashboard, I noticed that dark grey background leaves no contrast for the text, such as consume/manage/download media text. They're only really visible in dark mode and nearly invisible in auto-switch or light mode.
I'm also unclear on why I created an account password when registering, but when I try and log in to the store dashboard I have to receive an email and enter the 4 digit code, not the password.
I did mention the app dashboard 404 error in the little discord popup, but I was instructed to go to another channel and create some sort of ticket. Only problem is that I didn't have permission to post in that second channel, and the channel welcome message instructed me to pick from a list of action options (I guess?), but no such list was visible.
I'm sure most of this sort of stuff is obvious to your target audience and I was confused because I'm more of a unix VPS guy rather than a seedbox/plex expert.
That's super-valuable feedback, thank you. I'm blind to most of these issues (like the dark/light mode thing) due to familiarity! For the record, I'll respond to each issue above:
Good point, I'm going to update this link.
This is a bit awkward, yes. The 4-digit code facilitates biometric / webauth login in future, but the password is a fallback. The idea of the PIN ensures the user has a valid email address (avoids abuse), but having the password is a useful fallback for if the OwnID plugin (which provides the PIN thing) stops working, or if you want to force an immediate deletion of your account (which requires your password). I'd like to improve the UX here.
Our support system uses private channels in Discord - which I think are unsupported in the embedded widget, because (from the perspective of the discord server), you're not a real user, you're just a bot, impersonating one! I've been hesitant about adding email-based support tickets simply because realtime back/forth via Discord is so much more efficient, but I could add a fallback system. Was the prospect of joining Discord for support off-putting?
We're a sort of a mixture of both
The idea is to provide a turn-key UI for the traditional unix guys like me (clearly there's a way to go yet on this!), which eliminates all the hassle of the backend admin and lets you just trust that the apps will be running, secure, and up-to-date.
Thanks again for the feedback, I'm going to work on implementing the improvements!
D
Understood. I did think it was odd that I didn't have to verify my email address after creating an account, and now I know why!
Slightly. I assumed the 404 problem to be something stupid on my end, so I expected (best case!) to pop into discord and have someone hit me with a clue-by-four right away, as in "hey, you know you need to purchase a sub before the app dashboard is created on the backend, right?", rather than starting a formal ticket process.
Something else that took me a bit of time to understand--by default, there's some UI around an rclone client, so you can pull data in, but there's a not a rclone accessible server process, so you can't push data over without adding an app, such as webdav export, right? (BTW, https://elfhosted.com/apps/ links to https://elfhosted.com/app/webdavexport.md, which is 404 as well.)
Not sure how I managed to do it, but I'm seeing links such as https://elfhosted.com/app/app/seafile/ that also 404. Notice the /app/app? I think if you click https://elfhosted.com/apps/, then expands tools, click on https://elfhosted.com/app/webdavexport.md, then click on apps (https://elfhosted.com/apps/), expand tools, then click on seafile. It doesn't load a description, but it does update the tools links to have the doubled app/app path members.
I suspect hitting webdavexport.md screws up the routing for any following clicks.
Ah yes, that's an issue with the mkdocs-material theme, I think, it breaks navigation when you have a bad link. I've pushed a fix to resolve it
Yes, for 2 reasons.. (1) I need to capture a password to use to protect webdav, so we can't just expose it by default, and the only way to capture this password is via the subscription process (we can't, and don't want to, make it match your store password), and (2) it's another attempt to prevent / reduce abuse.
I don't see the need for a subscription to maintain the 100GB, just the 0.10 to open up WEBDAV to use it?
If I were to do a weekly backup off the low-spec nodes, the initial credits would last me 2 years, or am I missing a forced expiry?
It looks like this isn't viable because just using 'webdav' doesn't actually populate the dashboard page. Bummer.
At $0.05/day, the initial credits would last you 200 days, and adding the webdav access product should populate the dashboard - if it didn't, there's a bug, contact me (https://discord.elfhosted.com) with details and I'll look into it