DigiBoxx India - $39/year for 2 TB cloud storage

evnix · December 2020

This service has been launched recently, likely not a summerhost, as NITI Ayog(https://niti.gov.in/) had closely worked with the company throughout its development and were present during the launch. and from some other articles that I read, it wants to see itself as a competitor to Google Drive and be a cheap alternative when Google stops offering free photo storage.

It doesn't seem to be restricted to the country,
though I would be careful, wait a few months before you try as I see a few people complaining about silly bugs and they don't have seem to have a desktop app yet.

https://digiboxx.com/pricing-and-features

sonic · December 2020

Modi loves your data

sanvit · December 2020

The 30INR plan seems to be for the 100GB plan.
The 2TB plan is 234.82INR (199INR + 18% GST = 3.19USD) which is still cheap though

vyas · December 2020

@sonic said:
Modi loves your data

Would I rather have Zuckerburg or Bezos or pichai or Xi loving my data??

@sanvit wonder why you have to pay gst if you are ordering from outside India.

@evnix pricing in OP title incorrect.
2TB annual is INR 2,818 incl GST or @ 39 USDollars.

And

Add the below coupon to reduce the costs by ten precent overall.

sanvit · December 2020

@vyas said: @sanvit wonder why you have to pay gst if you are ordering from outside India.

The only country option available was India (at least for me)

evnix · December 2020

@vyas said: pricing in OP title incorrect.

got excited by the offer and I spoke too soon

I might still use this if it picks up, rather than stuffing all my data in Google with no human to contact if something goes wrong.
I feel it is cheaper than owning a 2TB SSD over 5 years.

seenu · December 2020

wow, good service at proper timing.

1Gbps connections are becoming affordable (if not cheaper) in India and this is good service.

i have more than 20 spare pcs and 50+ HDDs and thinking of starting a hosting service from home (for just indian customers) or starting some CDN (with friends in other metro cities and we all share those resources).

few years back, i would say...i would never host a site if it's DC in India but with DO, aws and technology improvement.... things have changed a lot.

BlaZe · December 2020

Gonna go for this. The company is being headed (or at least looked by) Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog.

vyas · December 2020

Below is not a rant, just some early testing/ user feedback. I could write a longer review some other time.
My main interest is in finding out where they store the data. I can bet it is Azure or a Singapore DC. Anything else will positively surprise me, and I am willing to get surprised!

Signed up, and hit the first roadblock:
Paid for 1 month of the 100 GB plan, about 40 US Cents a month :-)
their account management system is not set up to accept email aliases.
Have written to customer service, let us see. I did receive acknowledgement of my ticket.

The chatbot is useless, it throws up an irrelevant (to India) notice about GDPR privacy yada yada... must be shoved down the founders throat by investors/ lawyers.
Bot was unable to find a solution to my queries. I asked:
a. If I sign up for a lower plan using the coupon and decide to upgrade- will the discounted price be applicable?
b. Can I pay for a month now, and then change to annual billing (more for tax reasons)

The bot asked me for my email address ..
"We are not available to attend to your query right now. If you can leave your email address in the box below, someone will get back to you".

This is going to be fun!

@seenu said:

becoming affordable (if not cheaper) in India and this is good service.

i have more than 20 spare pcs and 50+ HDDs and thinking of starting a hosting service from home (for just indian customers) or starting some CDN (with friends in other metro cities and we all share those resources).

Just Do it!!!

seenu · December 2020

@vyas said: Just Do it!!!

which one? Hosting or CDN?

Abdullah · December 2020

@vyas will you do a review on your blog? I am interested to see how that works, ftp is supported, etc. or I might just get a month, its cheap

vyas · December 2020

@seenu said:

@vyas said: Just Do it!!!

which one? Hosting or CDN?

Whichever makes a business sense to you !

——-

@Abdullah said:
@vyas will you do a review on your blog? I am interested to see how that works, ftp is supported, etc. or I might just get a month, its cheap

Alpha Product.

Not even Beta

Not too impressed . Will post later

Update:
For the "India" hype- the website is hosted in germany ?

dig digiboxx.in


;; ANSWER SECTION:
digiboxx.in.        300 IN  A   91.195.240.94

traceroute 91.195.240.94

traceroute to 91.195.240.94 (91.195.240.94), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
 1  10.100.0.1 (10.100.0.1)  7.417 ms  7.315 ms  15.391 ms
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
 4  138.197.249.18 (138.197.249.18)  1786.862 ms  10.901 ms
    138.197.249.0 (138.197.249.0)  13.441 ms
 5  202.56.198.57 (202.56.198.57)  9.787 ms
    202.56.198.29 (202.56.198.29)  15.708 ms  15.953 ms
 6  * * 116.119.57.99 (116.119.57.99)  116.664 ms
 7  * * 116.119.44.253 (116.119.44.253)  145.826 ms
 8  182.79.239.127 (182.79.239.127)  173.202 ms
    182.79.224.132 (182.79.224.132)  32.609 ms *
 9  116.119.57.82 (116.119.57.82)  121.626 ms
    182.79.222.81 (182.79.222.81)  605.555 ms
    182.79.134.112 (182.79.134.112)  124.148 ms
10  * * mei-b3-link.telia.net (62.115.42.118)  123.912 ms
11  ffm-bb2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.124.60)  141.685 ms  306.193 ms *
12  mcn-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.124.47)  151.523 ms  145.149 ms  147.148 ms
13  mcn-b2-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.120.78)  142.598 ms  141.107 ms  144.818 ms

vyas · December 2020

So I sent a tweet to the founder, let us see what they come back with. Does this make sense?
Maybe I do Not understand Tech. Help appreciated. Why would anyone use a CDN in Germany for a website hosted in india?

Update:

https://twitter.com/aurnobmitro/status/1342787615016312834

evnix · December 2020

@vyas said: Why would anyone use a CDN in Germany for a website hosted in india?

I am just guessing here, May be the traffic out of Germany would be cheaper, like how bunnyCDN does for certain locations.
or likely the CDN provider simply does not have a location in India.

They seem to use cloudflare SSL ?
and you are right about the India hype, they have used the word India 14 times on the frontpage, now I can imagine how lame it would sound if every American website shouted USA! USA! USA! It will be a while before people learn not to do that and that there is a world outside their own country.
I can see why they did that, With all the companies blatantly selling your data, I can imagine people would rather have the data be within the country and that may be a good selling point.

vyas · December 2020

@evnix said:

@vyas said: Why would anyone use a CDN in Germany for a website hosted in india?

I am just guessing here, May be the traffic out of Germany would be cheaper, like how bunnyCDN does for certain locations.
or likely the CDN provider simply does not have a location in India.

They seem to use cloudflare SSL ?
and you are right about the India hype, they have used the word India 14 times on the frontpage, now I can imagine how lame it would sound if every American website shouted USA! USA! USA! It will be a while before people learn not to do that and that there is a world outside their own country.
I can see why they did that, With all the companies blatantly selling your data, I can imagine people would rather have the data be within the country and that may be a good selling point.

I have noticed in the past that CF free cdn tier routed traffic to Germany.
Their main website A record points to single IP that I believe traces to Interworks. The 9 ms latency in Germany (from Hetzner) also suggests the same... main domain could be hosted in Germany.

Why they use some CDN which is actually slowing down traffic from India when the intention is to speed up traffic FROM India.... is beyond me.

The subdomain used for storage (accounts. ) is behind Cloudflare..

This was my response to the guys tweet, and I left it at that. Broken design, half baked product.

Media reports btw also mentioned INR 30 for 5 TB data!! Which they have not bothered to correct.! So your initial post was probably derived from one such source.

——————

My tweet response is below:

Maybe I do not understand tech, and maybe it doesn't make sense to me traffic to Digiboxx website from India should be routed to Europe. And why the chat bot shows European GDPR compliance notice, when accessing the website from BLR. But thanks anyways.

vyas · December 2020

On a lighter note,
See what you started with your OP!

Edit: That explains a thing or two
https://viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=digiboxx.com

Sory I got a little too anal about this one because the founder's response and attitude was far from satisfactory.

evnix · December 2020

@vyas said: See what you started with your OP!

Oh well, I am truly Over Powered ?

@vyas said: because the founder's response and attitude was far from satisfactory.

They deserve it, the system is just too buggy, I wonder how did it even make past the testing team (or more likely there was no testing team).

Abdullah · December 2020

@vyas that makes no sense, twelve99 is Telia guess Germany & I think data is stored in Germany too (I couldn't trace any Indian IP on their services)

@vyas said:
On a lighter note,
See what you started with your OP!

Edit: That explains a thing or two
https://viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=digiboxx.com

Sory I got a little too anal about this one because the founder's response and attitude was far from satisfactory.

They trying to cover with cloudflare now, explains the response.

localhost · December 2020

@sanvit said:
The 30INR plan seems to be for the 100GB plan.
The 2TB plan is 234.82INR (199INR + 18% GST = 3.19USD) which is still cheap though

So we dont get to pay without a non indian card/ address?

vimalware · December 2020

The perfect place to upload photojournalism large RAWs from the Farmer Protests around Delhi.

JK. I have absolutely no idea what this is.
a homebrewed Nextcloud? ELI5?

gks · December 2020

I am not going to try for next 2 years. Edit: Till it is proven but they will promote like hell what they did for paytm

vyas · December 2020

@Abdullah said:
@vyas that makes no sense, twelve99 is Telia guess Germany & I think data is stored in Germany too (I couldn't trace any Indian IP on their services)

@vyas said:
On a lighter note,
See what you started with your OP!

Edit: That explains a thing or two
https://viewdns.info/iphistory/?domain=digiboxx.com

Sory I got a little too anal about this one because the founder's response and attitude was far from satisfactory.

They trying to cover with cloudflare now, explains the response.

Webwerks Mumbai
https://securitytrails.com/list/apex_domain/digiboxx.com

Interesting subdomains.
The platform is based on PHP7.2 which EOL'd in/....?

BlaZe · December 2020

@evnix said:
They deserve it, the system is just too buggy, I wonder how did it even make past the testing team (or more likely there was no testing team).

I blame the recruitment/hiring system.
Hiring donkeys to do the work of horses, doesn't go good.

You know what I am talking about. I bet most of the "engineers" hired to build that would be definitely not based on merit but the other insane factors. Reservation system

kwaralala · December 2020

@BlaZe said:

@evnix said:
They deserve it, the system is just too buggy, I wonder how did it even make past the testing team (or more likely there was no testing team).

I blame the recruitment/hiring system.
Hiring donkeys to do the work of horses, doesn't go good.

You know what I am talking about. I bet most of the "engineers" hired to build that would be definitely not based on merit but the other insane factors. Reservation system

This just makes me sad.

hzr · December 2020

@vyas said: For the "India" hype- the website is hosted in germany ?

That is digiboxx.in, which is a sedo parking page (germany hosted), there is no site at that domain.

The twitter response is one of the technically incompetent I have ever seen though.

hzr · December 2020

The app is incredibly badly written. There are so many ridiculous misspellings it's not even funny. Like the word Fragment and Listener are misspelled everywhere - you literally have to spell it right to extend the class, how do you screw that up?

For all the bragging about India First, it appears they load previews in an embedded webview https://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=...., basically sending it to G

Also, debug mode is on

Whoever they paid to build this, it's too much

vyas · December 2020

@hzr said:

@vyas said: For the "India" hype- the website is hosted in germany ?

That is digiboxx.in, which is a sedo parking page (germany hosted), there is no site at that domain.

I stand corrected on that one. There was a news article that originally referred to the .in domain, syndicated at multiple locations. They had other factual errors, some of which they rectified. The .com is hosted at WebWerks in Mumbai (most likely) and is slapped behind Cloudflare.

Too late to update my above post, but indeeed, the .in was the logical TLD. The .com has been around for a while looks like.

Update: I will post an update to the tweet, could not edit so had to delete.

Domain Name: DIGIBOXX.COM 
Registry Domain ID: 102997418_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN 
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.name.com 
Registrar URL: http://www.name.com 
Updated Date: 2020-11-02T13:34:31Z 
Creation Date: 2003-09-03T04:53:22Z 
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2021-09-03T04:53:22Z

The twitter response is one of the technically incompetent I have ever seen though.

There is more pain to come for users :-)

wordpress · December 2020

so @vyas yay or nay ? can we push or pull backup ? rclone,ftp/sftp anything ?

vyas · December 2020

Nay still.

You can delete the files from folder, but you cannot permanently delete from recycle bin
I used web version only and gave up. Haven't tried the app. Don't want to.
You cannot use alias or a relay service for account creation (I tried both vyas+digiboxx@emailprovider) or lastmx etc. does not work.
Multiple email /user accounts on same phone number: I have 3 accounts: 1 paid, 2 free. I gave a different address for each account, different state even. I still received the OTP via text message. No fraud check/ location check.
Paid account: I am locked out due to the alias issue- 48 hours and support is still 'looking into it'. I even explained to them the possible cause. One of the free accounts is locked out because I used 'lastmx' relay.
When you register they send you a 6 character password via email in plain text.

localhost · December 2020

@vyas said:
Nay still.

You can delete the files from folder, but you cannot permanently delete from recycle bin

I used web version only and gave up. Haven't tried the app. Don't want to.

You cannot use alias or a relay service for account creation (I tried both vyas+digiboxx@emailprovider) or lastmx etc. does not work.

Multiple email /user accounts on same phone number: I have 3 accounts: 1 paid, 2 free. I gave a different address for each account, different state even. I still received the OTP via text message. No fraud check/ location check.

Paid account: I am locked out due to the alias issue- 48 hours and support is still 'looking into it'. I even explained to them the possible cause. One of the free accounts is locked out because I used 'lastmx' relay.

When you register they send you a 6 character password via email in plain text.

I'd like to try it. Any idea of some reputed services that can provide a phone number in India for receiving sms? I am not looking for those free otp burner phone numbers... could not find any.

Interesting to see that they are able to activate multiple accounts under same phone number!

vyas · January 2021

Update:
they refunded me the amount for 1 months paid subscription,and it is curtains drawn onDigiboxx. Wishing the guys all the best, it was not a servicee worth my time.

DigiBoxx India - $39/year for 2 TB cloud storage

Comments

Alpha Product.