Joyent, the company behind the developer-centric hosting service TextDrive, has released a new product — Bingo! on-line disk service.
Joyent’s new Bingo! on-line disk service gives you 100 gigabytes of disk storage on Sun’s amazing X4500 platform with 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month over WebDAV for the super-low price of $199 a year! You get one user account and the ability to serve files from a public folder (for images, podcasts, whatever). On top of this, you get a complimentary 5-user subscription to Connector, Joyent’s amazing group collaboration product.
Pretty good price on a very good hardware let me say. I guess they must have sourced quite a few Sun Fire X4500 to make the price this competitive. At $16.60/month it makes a great online storage solution. However, monthly transfer has been limited to 10GB/month, so it would take almost a year to fill up your account without incurring extra costs.
Pricing is a bit funny though. First of all, isn’t it a direct competition with Joyent’s another service, Strongspace, which provides on-line backup via SFTP and Rsync? Sure, it gives you Rsync (instead of WebDAV), and there is no extra bandwidth charge, but at $8/month with only 4GB of storage, you can tell where the customers will go.
Moreover, Bingo! came with 5 user subscription to Joyent Connector, which itself costs $15/month, and comes with only 5GB of storage. I can see Bingo! is making the “Start” plan redundant.
Update: Take what David Young has said,
No, we’re not staring. We’re building. Bingo is a key foundation.
And what Brian Duffy has later commented,
Your pricing model is pretty cool… getting 100GB/mo with 10GB/mo transfer costs about the same as if you used Amazon S3.
I think I know what Joyent is building — an Amazon S3 killer. Note that Amazon S3 is not just an on-line storage with a cool API — it is going to be the foundation of other Amazon service products like EC2. Now Joyent has Bingo! backing Connector for storage, but I am sure there will be many others under their secret plans.
Moreover, the pricing is set to match with S3′s. Each gigabyte of storage comes down to 16.6 cent per month, plus included 10Gb per month transfer, and on top of that, the extra transfer is on par with S3.
API? Too bad Bingo doesn’t have a set of API like Amazon S3. When you have a well defined and implemented-to-death protocol like WebDAV, you don’t need an API :)
Well, that gets me excited.