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100 time cheaper dropbox like service (hubic.com)
117 points by sebgeelen on Feb 7, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 96 comments



OVH (english website [1]) is the best French hosting company and one of the best French domain name registar (with Gandi [2]), and are starting to make themselves a name outside of France. Hubic is the "cloud" offer from OVH.

They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive, and have very fair prices (they are like the hosting counterparts of Free [3], a French ISP that drove subscription fees down to what they now are and forced other ISPs to make their prices fairer).

[1] http://www.ovh.co.uk/

[2] http://en.gandi.net/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_%28ISP%29


OVH is the largest not the best French host. They're a budget host that vastly oversells. OVH has no such reputation for responsiveness, their "fair" prices are based on many fold overselling their network and holding onto and charging the same for hardware that's ten years old. They recycle disks even when they're about to die. They overload racks and cause power issues (Your whole rack rebooted? Sorry, one of the servers on it drew enough power under load to flip a breaker) . They randomly reboot servers as part of their DDoS protection. They think sending UDP packets is nefarious and will wipe your server for it.


You are a customer or where is that info coming from ?


I've had some SLA annoyances from them and setup fees have been expensive, but overall their dedicated servers have provided me with pretty fantastic value when I was running them.

I'm a Canadian and I've been considering grabbing a box here from them, www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers.xml the pricing is ridiculously low.

You wouldn't get 10TB, but if you mirror the disks for 50$ a month you have a reliable 2TB of disk space in a datacenter much closer (for most) and 4 cores on 32GB of ram would give you a nice gaming server or a pretty powerful database.

Their VPS product (if they still do that anymore) would most likely be oversold. They are a massive operation that competes aggressively on price.


They run the Kimsufi line, which is massively oversold (close to 40 "100mbps" clients per real 100Mbps). Their EG and HG server series is also way oversold if you've ever attempted to use the network to its fullest.

Plus Oles, the CEO of OVH, goes on tirades against his customers every few months.


A customer of many years, with at one point many servers with them. Now I only have a few to service some French customers.


"They both have quite a reputation of being reliable and very responsive"

Have you ever dealt with their support? - I for myself am quite happy with my service (Dedicated server) so far (because I rarely had to deal with the support) but I've heard a few horror stories where some of their biggest UK customers basically got kicked out even though they stayed within the TOS and the terms they signed the contract for, or the thing about their DDoS protection kicking in, rebooting your server even though they are legit requests.

You can't beat their prices though.


Their support by email / Internet is just nonexistent: I've never had any reply to the many messages I've sent this way. The support by phone requires you to wait about ~20 minutes until someone takes your call, but then, it's very efficient (in my case, at least).

I'm very happy I almost never have any problem with OVH (I've two DSL connections with included Hubic accounts and a few web hosting with included domain names), because the support is not great at all.


Were these recent stories ? I remember slightly lower than average service quality, but this was around 2003.


Do you have links to these "stories"?


Or that one: http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showthread.php?6555-bandwidth-VPS-pCI...

Where they basically looked at their customers and said "look, you are one of our 30% top customers in bandwidth usage, you'll have to pay from now on." Even though they (Or the company I used) were using their top of the line servers which are exactly offered for bandwidth intensive services like the ones mentioned in their forum post. So it's not really a solid company if you want to work with them long term or build a business on top of their service.

The company I'm referring to is now running their own network on their own hardware in a carrier neutral facility.


You could try the following google, it gives you an idea:

https://www.google.com/search?q=OVH+support+site:webhostingt...

For some people a provider like OVH is "good enough", but there is a reason it is cheap.


Not exactly what dewey was referring to, but for example they unilaterally cancelled their VoIP service to a large part of their customers in Europe, without any kind of explanation.


From what i read, they said that they didn't get enough customers and revenue to justify it's existence - what other reason should there be?

And it was not sudden, they informed customers 3 months in advance.

I've been with 3 swedish voip providers that shut down after a couple of years, so i'd guess it's hard to make it work.


That's what I've read too, but there doesn't seem to be any official story. I've also read that they closed because it was being abused with services like Classicfon where you earn a few cents per hour you call them. VoIP is a crazy world.


Why do you leap to OVH's defense in any thread about them?


OVH is probably the biggest, but it's unfair to say they are the best: they are a low-cost hosting company and provide a minimal support, unless you pay the price.

Moreover, OVH sometimes take quite stupid commercial decisions without notice. For instance, two months ago, they decided to put on hold any dedicated server command without notice... during more than 5 weeks.

Why did they do that? Because OVH's CEO became angry at customers ordering upgraded servers instead of renewing the leasing of their older ones.

As of Free, they bully and racket network peers which need to send traffic over their network as much as they can. (See how slow is youtube over the Free network, for instance...)


I also use OVH as an ISP and quite happy so far. I had connectivity problems once and a technical person answered my email within a couple of hours. By the end of the day it was back to normal.


Seems to be based on OpenStack [1] Storage [2]. That means any client that supports OpenStack (and Rackspace Cloud Files [3], for that matter) like Cyberduck [4] and a lot more should already be compatible with hubiC.

[1] http://www.openstack.org/

[2] https://api.hubic.com/

[3] http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/openstack

[4] http://cyberduck.ch


Do you know a good client for Linux? Their official client [1] requires mono and I don't want to install that on my server (or even my desktop, for that matter).

[1] http://mir7.ovh.net/ovh-applications/hubic/hubiC-Linux/1.1.1...


Cloudfuse [1] allows you to mount remote OpenStack Storage. You'll need to tweak with the ~/.cloudfuse config file. I haven't tested it though.

[1] http://redbo.github.io/cloudfuse/


They seem to use custom OAuth-based facade, so bare OpenStack clients won't work out of the box (or I'm missing something, I'm just starting to read about what Swift is).

First I tried to use API console to get storage API URI and auth token, but I misunderstood something and it didn't work for me.

This, on the other hand, helped, although it uses some other API endpoints (still, those are OVH APIs): https://github.com/gierschv/node-hubic-swiftauth


> I confirm having read and fully understood the hubiC General COnditions

> PDF en français

Luckily, Google Translate provides mostly readable results, but if they present site in English they really should consider translating ToS too.

Although I was unable to share direct link (Google rejects to translate PDF from URL, only by direct upload), and the result not peeep.us-able, I was able to save it as a paste here to save others time downloading and uploading the PDF: http://dabblet.com/gist/8861421 (Dabblet seems broken, too, "view full page result" fails, so click "result" tab to get rid of unnecessary panes)

Some points I got(but may have misunderstood) from there:

- There're 10Mbps up/down bandwidth limits.

- You remain the sole owner of your data.

- Not allowed to store and/or share ("stocker et/ou partager") porn (huh‽) and some other kind of content considered indecent, disturbing or unlawful.

- They're not responsible for failed transfers, you explicitly agree have to check that the files succesfully uploaded by yourself.

- Commercial use of service is prohibited (uh... only personal accounts?)

- I didn't really get this part: "Le Client s'engage à régler directement à l'auteur de la réclamation toute somme que celui ci exigerait d’OVH." but Google says it translates to something like "The Customer agrees to pay directly to the author of the claim any amount that it would require OVH." From the context, I may guess the meaning is, that if you somehow caused some damage, you're going to protect OVH in court and if you/they're held responsible, you're going to pay those damages. Hmmm...


Not sure if that will help, but here's my understanding:

"Le Client s'engage à régler directement à l'auteur de la réclamation toute somme que celui ci exigerait d’OVH." If an author ask compensation to OVH, you (OVH Client) pay the author directly the wanted amount.


Ah, right. Thank you. Seems this part is about copyright violations. Sounds reasonable to me then.


It doesn't sound reasonable to me - how do they find the violations?


Hubic is run under French law, this means that you need first to get a complaint, the complaint must go in front of a judge and then if the user is found to have broken the law and if the result is a compensation, the user will have to pay. But of course, the user can push against the judgement to a upper court etc. Standard copyright law, dura lex, sed lex.


So how would someone discover that they can make a complaint?


hubiC allows file sharing by link/email etc (they call it "Publication")


Android client wants access to my calendar and contacts for some reason. I'm gonna install it anyway because I can prevent it from accessing those things after the fact because I'm running an OpenPDroid modified Cyanogenmod.


Wow, that's sickly cheap!

Seems to be owned and run by OVH France.

But without encryption and private keys, i'd rather rent a server and use Duplicati.


I can't understand how people trust (or even care about) server-provided encryption. There's no guarantee they or their friends can't open it on their servers. Unless you use your own solution, their encryption only provides protection in transit, against unaffiliated third parties.


Link encryption is good, and it's helpful to ensure the only attack vector is the service provider itself, not sub-contractors or someone being stupid and throwing away drives.

That said, Dropbox has done a pretty good job of lying about how much security they offered users in the past. But someone providing a service like this with a reasonable security policy which is openly communicated to the users is still better than no security policy.


When it comes to zero-knowledge encryption, it is hard to know how their implementation holds up without external audits. This is the same for other encryption applications (google Truecrypt audit).

EVault, Wuala, Tarsnap, SpiderOak, Norton Zone, KeepVault, Jungle Disk, ElephantDrive, CrashPlan, Carbonite, F-Secure, Handy Backup, IASO Backup, MediaFire, MEGA, OwnDrive, TeamDrive etc..

..all provide Zero-Knowledge encryption for their cloud backups, i think OVH should be able to at least the same.


What's the point of "supposedly zero-knowledge encryption" if you can't even be sure it's there?

If you care about your data security, you'd better consider there is no encryption in such cases. If you don't care - why ask for encryption at all?


Well, you can always use LUKS, Truecrypt, EncFS or something similar. I'm more worried about data loss. How redundant is their storage?


If you have enough devices yourself does it matter much? I'd take uptime over redundancy. I always have 2 work pc copies + 2 laptops going. As long as they don't sync empty folders back down I don't mind a services that's only got light redundancy.


According to the website, they store copies in 3 different locations.

> Data is copied in 3 seperate datacentres in France.


Plus your own 1 or more copies of the data


What prevents you from considering this as a bare storage backend to use with Duplicati or, say, TAHOE-LAFS?


Jesus that's cheap. Anyone know how good their differential syncing is, or what they are using (librsync?) Are they using inotify or is it a regular tree walk?


(Fires up a decompiler) Let's check...

1. From a quick glance I can't find anything related to patching in backend or change handling classes. Either I'm missing something or it doesn't handle arbitrary changes well. There's some suspect-driving long ByteDelta property on Change class, but I fail to see where it's used in a meaningful manner.

2. It uses a lightweight abstraction over System.IO.FileSystemWatcher. This means inotify, when ran on Mono on GNU/Linux.


The hubic desktop app crashes on Fedora 20.

Basically it says good bye with:

~/Downloads/hubic> hubic main-loop [INFO | 2/9/2014 9:05:08 PM | Ovh.Hubic.Sync.Linux.CLI.Server.MainLoop] Application starts (Version: 1.1.13.22-64; Platform: Unix 3.12.9.301) [ERROR | 2/9/2014 9:05:08 PM | Ovh.Hubic.Backend.HubicAccountHandler.GetGreetings] Got error while getting greetings: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Runtime.Serialization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' or one of its dependencies.


Just tried to sign up for the 10TB plan, figure it's a good price for backing up my archive of DNG photographs, which is about 1TB.

Not going well so far, credit card form was in french... Said it failed, it refreshed itself, says it's worked, but it isn't showing up on my account.

Something tells me that 10 euros is going to cost a hell of a lot more than that of my time getting to the bottom of this.


I like OVH and everything, even if I don't host with them anymore.

However I tried this service a few months ago, and it was very unreliable and slow to sync files. Sharing files between different people in particular was quite a hassle, which is why i quit using it. Also, I had a lot of trouble with the Linux client. It may get better with time though as the project was only started in 2013 i believe.

It's good to have cheap alternatives but if you can pay for Dropbox there's just no comparison in the products.


I started using it a year ago. I'm happy with it. It's lacking a polished linux client (cli atm), but they're working on it.

On a Sdsl line my upload rate (pc <-> hubic) is 45kb/s, download is 120kb/s. Not mind blowing but it's enough for me, running in the background.

For casual sync and backup, I totaly recommend.


They seem to have clients for all the major operating systems. Desktop and mobile: https://hubic.com/en/downloads

Linux (BETA), OSX, Windows, Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8, Blackberry


Do you know if it works on ARM? I'd be interested in running this on my network harddrive enclosure or perhaps a raspberry pi.


The Linux client requires mono 2.10+, so I assume this is something written in .NET.


I wonder.. could this be a fork of the ol' iFolder by Novell?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFolder


No, it's proprietary software.

The project structure is completely different, so it's probably not even inspired by iFolder.


It seems that their links are already running at half capacity. http://weathermap.ovh.net/

OVH is a big company though, so I'm more or less confident that they can handle this smoothly.


OT: Anyone know of a "weathermap" like this that can be overlaid w/ Google Earth or similar?


From their forum: "As nearly 270,000 of you now use hubiC, we have been able to confirm our technical decisions and this volume has enabled us to further optimise our infrastructure and its performances. Result: we're now able to lower our prices again, and this time we're aiming for nothing less than a million users!"

Let's see how that works out, OVH isn't really known to run a uncongested network. I'm still excited because it's just a crazy cheap place to move additional backups to.


For backups Backblaze is even cheaper, but I could see the advantage in using it as data storage and duplicating to my computer as needed. Probably cheaper than buying and managing my own hard drives; definitely safer.

Does anyone know how fast is the download from their servers?


Earlier when I used to see people mentioning BackBlaze and not CrashPlan I used to be pissed in a way,but after I used its (BB's) native app for a month (on trial) I could see the difference.


BackBlaze only keeps deleted files for 30 days. They are backup copy, not backup archive. At least CrashPlan could be used as both with "remove deleted versions: never" setting.


Yes, that's one thing. But if that's not a big issue for me (which is not) then the CrashPlan interface and app makes me cry. (I am still a CrashPlan user though; "friends" as destination is sth very important to me).


Backblaze is for backup, this is for storage.


I tried hubiC and it exactly same as dropbox, but worse services and better prices. So it is useless. I need cloud storage which I could use "unsynchronized". If I had 10TB hardrive in my MAC, I would use it. But I have only 100 GB so it is useless


I dont know why everything about OVH 's graphics and design all seems to have a distinct lack of taste. In other words they are ugly.

Now back to topic. How much is it in USD then? Since it paid in Euro and includes VAT by default. What if i dont need to pay VAT?


Pretty happy with Crashplan but I might sign up for this also just to have some storage I can access via an API. Crashplan only works with their client and their client isn't exactly lightweight to leave running 24/7.


LOVE Crashplan, but you're absolutely right about their client being resource-intensive. It's my number one complaint about their service.


I can't seem to find their privacy policy and ToS document is in French. I think I'll pass.

In fact, the only mention of privacy I found is "respect for privacy" in data security.


https://hubic.com/en/data-security

It's marketing but... """ Only you can access and share the contents of your hubiC space using your username and password. You are also solely responsible for the content you place on hubiC and share with your contacts. As the OVH servers are installed on French soil, the hubiC service is subject to French legislation, which is particularly demanding in terms of personal data protection and respect for privacy. So, unlike many online storage providers that use machines located on US territory, hubiC does not fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Patriot Act, which authorises the security services to access any computerised data held by individuals and businesses, without obtaining prior authorisation and without informing users. """ French/Euro laws are fairly good iirc. (feel free to check yourself) and companies generally follow them.

Interestingly I lived near Roubaix for a while and never noticed a data center :)

Edit: from my not so great French (reading the terms): They are responsible for security, everything SSL, privacy respected, won't hinder you if you want to move your data [IANAL but looks like a fairly standard French legal IT document...at least it is similarly structure like my work contract was]


> Interestingly I lived near Roubaix for a while and never noticed a data center :)

Then you may be interested in this thread: https://lafibre.info/ovh-datacenter/data-center-ovh-roubaix-...

They also have datacenters in Strasbourg, Paris, Gravelines and Montreal (Canada), but I am not sure if they host part of the hubiC service there.


Encryption is harder to break than any privacy policy.


Don't see any mention about encryption on the page. Or are you suggesting that it can be done manually by user?


The latter.


Is wanting both unreasonable? I didn't think so.


I think the point is that you can't trust third party encryption/privacy statements anyway. If you really care about your privacy you should encrypt your files on your side. There are plenty of solutions to do just that.

Everything else is the equivalent of the "do not track" header, security through homeopathy.


Privacy policy / TOS is something you can base legal cases on in some countries and something certain organizations try to check. And I just have difficulties to trust companies that simply don't say anything on the matter. It doesn't seem to you like they're hiding something?

Though yes, I agree that nothing you don't do on your own is really trustworthy. That's why I don't use online storage for storing confidential data, heh. Only puush for the little things. (what's going on with Puush anyway? They've been silent since "going down for maintenance briefly" in September). I guess treating internet as if there is no privacy is for the best.


It is unfortunate that they ask you to "confirm having read and fully understood the hubiC General Terms and Conditions (sic)" in English, but then present the terms and conditions in French. Absolutely nothing against the French language, but there's a clear disconnect there.

Hey ho, it's not like I read them anyway!


For the privacy part they should conform at minimum to European and French privacy law. French privacy Law offers some protection and the CNIL seems to enforce the law.


"The company has eight datacentres housing at least 145,000 machines."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVH


Upload is slow. From web interface it's around 300KB/s at the moment for me. Just for fun tried out Mega and it's 4MB/s-7MB/s there.


Does anyone know if HubiC supports file versioning, like Dropbox? Or will older revisions be lost when a file is changed?


Last name and first name fields are mislabeled (switched) when I go to sign up. Cheers!


Only restricted time for sharing ?

Or is an add-on planed for permanent shares (e.g. for companies)?


I wonder if hubiC uses deduplication across accounts like dropbox does.


I think the answer to this question is pretty much obvious.


I don't think this is so obvious. They write that the files are encrypted with my password and that only I have access to them.


Could you provide a link for this statement?

I found only statements about transport layer security, not about storage.

Maybe it meant not "encrypted" but "protected"?


https://hubic.com/en/discover-hubic

“Only you will have access to your data, using your login and password.”

I admit that the statement above is ambiguous, which is why I think the answer isn't obvious, and which again is why I asked the question in the first place.


> “Only you will have access to your data, using your login and password.”

I don't remember their exact wording, but that sounds very similar to what Dropbox originally claimed (before it was determined that their employees absolutely did have access to your data).


Are there really people who are turned off by dropbox prices?

I would take notice if someone made a dropbox with a valuable additional feature, or a dropbox that worked better (recognizing that already dropbox works very smoothly).

But price seems like a nonstarter.


Every personal user I know doesn't upgrade to the next tier because of the price.


I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure. They need a $5/month bucket, DigitalOcean style.

IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition and would take in tonnes of cash. Making it the Spotify of storage.


> I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure.

I've long thought the same thing, both on their personal and business accounts.

On the personal side, the free 2 GB account isn't quite enough for my needs but 100 GB is waaaaay more than what I'd use.

> IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition ...

I'd happily pay that. Hell, I'd pay $5/month for, say, 20 GB. Realistically, I'd rarely use more than 10 GB.

It's the same story on the business side. My small team of eight would love to use Dropbox but, again, it's not a huge amount of storage that we need -- 10 GB would likely be more than we'd ever use. Instead, it's the ease with which we can all share that 10 GB of files that I'd happily pay for.

That 10 GB of storage would cost us $120/mo. (it could be as low as $80/month, but we could/would use those extra features so I'd go for the higher level).

Granted, $120/month isn't a lot and it would be much easier to justify if we were going to come close to using the whole 100 GB of storage. Since we effectively need to be able to easily share the contents of a small USB flash drive, though, $120/mo. seems a little outrageous.

At the very least, it seems that "per-user" isn't the best option in all cases and that other methods of charging would be a better fit. For example, there are a few non-technical people in our office that we might consider adding. They would rarely need access to any of the files we'd store on Dropbox but it might be nice to have them as users "just in case" -- but not for $15/user/month.

In our case, Dropbox would quickly gain us as a customer if we could instead pay based upon the amount of storage we use (it seems ironic that this isn't an option, considering storage is likely one of their highest costs). We would, for example, sign up today if there was a "$1/GB/month regardless of number of users" option.

As an added bonus, our daily use of Dropbox would likely result in us recommending it to many of our customers who would also sign up (if they could also pay based upon storage and not the number of users).


Would that cover their S3 costs to store the data?


I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage, but they don't offer anything in that area.

This service does, and for an astonishingly great price. 10TiB for 10€, and they even promised something about internal 3x storage redundancy. I'm unzipping my wallet right after I run basic checks with free account.


> I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage ...

That's what I'm using Amazon Glacier for. I have tons of old files that I'll likely never need/want again and that I would normally just blow away in order to regain the disk space. It's so damn cheap, though, that I've started archiving them all to Glacier and then blowing them away.


Well, this offer seems to be about 10x cheaper.

Not to say you don't have to wait for hours before you retrieve the file, and it's flat rate, not "download some percent from what you've uploaded today for free, otherwise pay for the bandwidth" plan.

For example, I've used Bitcasa before, but consider them too unreliable as a long-term business and left their service. It didn't cost me a cent to pull all the data back (with some minor exceptions their buggy software managed to lose unrecoverably, but I never considered them rock-solid-reliable from the beginning and had backups). With Glacier, I guess, I'd have to shell out $150 (~1.5TB) just to leave with my data.

There are other unlimited/large storage offers of various pricing and quality, but this one seem the best to me this far because of OpenStack API (I'd wish Cyphertite had a datacenter in Europe or Russia, but nope, so they're too slow for me, and I'm not really sure even though they're "unlimited" they'll be happy with terabyte archives). That is, unless one has more than 10 terabytes to archive.


Those prices are crazy and are not sustainable. I don't think they're going to disappear, but customers should expect prices to rise in the future ...


actually according to dewey:

From their forum: "As nearly 270,000 of you now use hubiC, we have been able to confirm our technical decisions and this volume has enabled us to further optimise our infrastructure and its performances. Result: we're now able to lower our prices again, and this time we're aiming for nothing less than a million users!"


I don't see in any part of his statement that they're profitable and that they won't rise the prices once they have established dominance in the storage market.

It's only by being so cheap that they can carve themselves a place in this saturated market.




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