I thought I would take a look at how well the Storj project has progressed since I last looked at it. This has always been a project I have kept my eye on since I use cloud storage in both my personal life and my work life.
I first looked at the cost to store data on the network. According to their pricing page (https://storj.io/pricing.html) at the moment it costs $0.015 per GB per month and $0.05 per GB downloaded. These prices seemed to be somewhat close to what services like Amazon and Google provide. At a quick glance at Google and Amazon's pricing they both seem to come in around $0.025 per GB per month storage. So it seems Storj is actually offering a lower price here. Another quick search for per GB download price on the big networks shows about $0.09 per GB download (outside of their networks). Again Storj with the win!
The next thing I did was create an account at https://storj.io . It was an easy sign up process with only email and password needed. Then my email was verified. So far so good! Using this interface I was then able to create buckets that I would then be able to store files inside very similar to other services. Creating a bucket was easy, but once I created a bucket I realised that I could not add files into these buckets from this online interface. A short look around showed me that I would have to use either Filezilla, the Community GUI client, Libstorj CLI or the API. The fact that the web app on storj.io does not allow uploading and downloading I think will cause many users to stop right at this point and not try to go further.
This project has progressed a lot since I last looked at it, but there still seems to be a long way to go. Getting people to use this for cloud storage will require a simple process of accessing those files similar to dropbox or google storage. I see some posts around the internet complaining about their Storj coins not increasing in price. The only way I see the price increase is if the project becomes more mature and get a lot more users storing their data on this network. The best way to help to do this is to contribute to the coding and documentation of the many components of this ecosystem or directly donating to the people working on them.
I see the creator of EasyStorj (the Community GUI client) is accepting donations:
BTC and SJCX: 1LWMe1AuQSNQq6zUEtC8vMaV3LhS8r1uFw
Ethereum (ETH) and STORJ Token: 0x61688e7822327C30B6AcC26F737941Deca787033
Monero {For very anonymous donations} (XMR):
42VP4x4CRtwf9PXD3J73ntQHb2f2BYHVR75ovjeSNWzRF4X34mdf367VWD74kD4zDT3ReY6t5uQxAC9FWCPnMQjpQ3xFsV9
I am going to continue using this storage network and look at how easy it is to use each of the interfaces to manage files. I am also interested to see how fast upload/download speeds are when using these different tools. Hopefully I do not hit any major issues and I can report back with good feedback.
Rumble.