Cheap open source cloud hosting

SpiderOak’s new online hosting Nimbus.IO is half the price of Amazon S3 and is based on open source software: the server and client parts are free and will be distributed according to the open-source model (AGPL server, LGPL client). True, Nimbus.IO is still in closed beta and the source code is not available to everyone, but the developers promise to post the codes on github soon.

About the REST API, they don’t say anything yet, only that they are “similar to S3 and Rackspace, that is, they use the JSON format instead of XML”.

The service for online backup and file synchronization SpiderOak was launched in 2007. During this time, developers rewrote software for backend management four times and changed the server architecture five times. In their words, there are no suitable solutions on the market for cheap and reliable long-term data storage. Existing GlusterFS, Linux DRBD, MogileFS, Riak + Luwak, and Amazon S3 systems work at RAID 2 through RAID 4 levels, that is, they work with a large overhead, which increases the cost for performance. They also wanted something else - low cost with high reliability, albeit at the expense of performance.

As a result, they achieved what they wanted and decided, in addition to the main business, to open an additional one: online hosting modeled on Amazon S3.

Unlike other cloud hosting systems, Nimbus.IO runs on RAID 6 , where data blocks and checksums are cyclically written to all disks of the array, there is no asymmetric disk configuration.



Because of this, performance suffers: additional resources are spent on recording. But this is not critical for long-term data storage in backup systems. The most important thing is that efficiency is increased. As a result, the Nimbus.IO service was able to roll out the prices half as much as in the Amazon S3.

Hosting 100 GB - $ 6 per month
Traffic to external networks - $ 0.06 per 1 GB
PUT and LISTMATCH requests - $ 0.01 per 1000
Other requests - $ 0.01 per 10 000 or free.

Now the service is in closed beta testing. You can leave an email and wait for an invite, with which they promise two months of free hosting.