Joyent

Joyent Weblog

Bingo!

By David Young 12 September 06

100 gigabytes of storage on the internet for $199!

Joyent is pleased to introduce Bingo!: a huge 100 gigabyte chunk of secure, available-anywhere storage for the amazing price of $199 per year. Access your storage right from your desktop, on any computer connected to the internet. Plus, you can easily make whatever files you like available to the world via your own public directory.

Key features of Bingo

  • Use your own domain (disk.mycompany.com) or mycompany.bingodisk.com
  • 100 gigabytes of storage
  • 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month free bandwidth, 20 cents per gigabyte thereafter
  • Easily accessible via WebDAV on most every operating system
  • Your own public files folder

Protected against disk failure

Bingo! uses disk architecture that is a magnitude more reliable than that hard drive you may be tempted to buy down at the local CompuMall. Rather than writing your data to a single drive, Bingo! securely spreads the data across a massive array of disks, and this significantly improves reliability without sacrificing access speed.

Easy access at fast speeds

Bingo! uses WebDAV to provide access to your storage. This means any computer, Windows, Linux, Macintosh, can use Bingo! just like a local hard disk. And the hardware architecture behind Bingo! ensures that you’ll get your data promptly.

Play Bingo!

We hope you’ll give Bingo! a try.


  1. “How much would 45 100-gigabyte disks cost? That’s what you have to buy to get the reliability of Bingo!”

    Somehow I doubt that Bingo is 45-way replicated (e.g. survives 44 disk failures), but maybe I’m wrong.

    — Wes Felter    612 days ago    #

  2. are you guys starving or something?

    — crybaby    612 days ago    #

  3. Brilliant!

    — jonto    612 days ago    #

  4. Wes: that’s what happens on an x4500. All data is written across 45 disks (since we have some parity for raidz). That doesn’t mean each bit is written across 45 disks. Rather, that is the target. We can write your date redudantly across 45 disks.

    — David Young    612 days ago    #

  5. Crybaby: No, we’re not staring. We’re building. Bingo is a key foundation.

    — David Young    612 days ago    #

  6. Cool… not something I’ll use since I’m quite happy with 4 gigs of StrongSpace, but the WebDAV would be really nice. I’ve kinda been waiting for that feature to be implemented for awhile, and this announcement has me a little worried that it won’t be coming.

    Care to allay my fears or should I get started working on some kind of crazy WebDAV->SFTP proxy thing?

    — Bob Aman    612 days ago    #

  7. I know you write data across 45 disks in an X4500, but you can only survive N disk failures, where N is probably 6-10. I can survive N disk failures by buying N+1 100GB disks, not 45 disks.

    I think the service can stand on its merits; incorrect marketing hyperbole seems unprofessional.

    — Wes Felter    611 days ago    #

  8. Your pricing model is pretty cool… getting 100GB/mo with 10GB/mo transfer costs about the same as if you used Amazon S3.

    Are there any plans to integrate other features like calendaring on top of this?

    — Brian Duffy    611 days ago    #

  9. Will bingodisk added to lifetime/mixed grill accounts?

    — Linnane    611 days ago    #

  10. Brian: we will be doing integration with calendaring. Joyent already offers a great calendar as part of our Connector suite. You get a 5-user tier of Connector when buying Bingo. The integration between the two is in process.

    — David Young    611 days ago    #

  11. Linnane: no. Bingo disk is a stand-alone offering.

    — David Young    611 days ago    #

  12. Why not just expand the services provided by Strongspace instead of creating a whole new product?

    — Anthony    610 days ago    #

  13. Don’t forget to add the Bingo product graphic below Jill’s under the “Our Products” line up on the right hand side. I can’t help it, I’m OCD!

    — Jonto    610 days ago    #

  14. Can I use bingodisk to serve my static web content for my commercial web site?

    — James    610 days ago    #

  15. Thats quite expensive. I guess it is only good for business as a company wide storage (but then the traffic limit is hard, you cant even fill the whole storage without additional traffic fee).

    Will you offer multiple user accounts for a single “Disk”?

    I think I stay with the free alternatives (and wait for G-Drive :)

    Bernd

    — Bernd Eckenfels    610 days ago    #

  16. James: yes. Bingo disk is accessible over HTTP.

    — David Young    610 days ago    #

  17. Bernd: expensive? Its the cheapest storage I’m aware of on internet. And with regard to the traffic limit: we know that most users won’t use more than 10gb per month. If we gave more bandwidth (a commodity we don’t control), we’d have to charge more for Bingo, plain and simple. When you buy a car, you don’t expect gas, too. We’re giving out 10 units (gallons/liters) for free.

    I think the argument you should be making is: “why can’t I only buy the storage I need?” Hmmm. That would be very nice. Very nice. Yeah, there is a couple of services that allow one to buy in that way today (and no free bandwidth, BTW)...but its behind a proprietary API (unlike Bingo’s HTTP).

    — David Young    610 days ago    #

  18. Alright, here’s a question: Does the 10gb bandwidth limit apply to WebDav and uploads from your computer, or just to downloads over http?

    In practice, if I were to upload a 50gb disk image, would I be over my bandwidth and paying?

    Either way, cool service!

    — Wanderfowl    610 days ago    #

  19. I think a real world scenario would be I uploaded a few files that I want to link for many many people to download therefore needing more bandwidth than actual storage space. its kind of like (to use your fuel analogy) equipping a full size SUV with a really small gas tank. It won’t get vary far.

    — Anthony    609 days ago    #

  20. @David

    Is WebDav the only way I can upload documents?

    Can I use ftp/sftp?

    — James    609 days ago    #

  21. WebDAV only James.

    — Johan Sørensen    607 days ago    #

  22. Joyent,

    Please look into providing ftp/sftp support.

    I would love to use BingoDisk to serve my static commercial web site content, much like how I can with Amazon S3.

    I am development a web site that needs to write out static html/image files to disk and I cannot find a webdav python library (the language powering my commercial web site) in order to use BingoDisk as my static media (html/image) web server.

    — James    607 days ago    #

  23. Hi James. Bingo will only be WebDAV. Could you use this or this? By the way, smart use of Bingo. ;)

    — David Young    607 days ago    #

  24. @David

    Thanks for the links, I will certainly look into using the library you found and happily look forward to becoming a BingoDisk (Joyent) customer.

    Thanks again

    James

    — James    607 days ago    #

  25. I love Joyent, I really do. Which is why I’m so frustrated that your Connector is so broken, support won’t even reply to my beta issues, and yet you’re releasing new products that make my $1399 investment look increasingly like a waste.

    The hosting is falling by the wayside, and the apps many users have invested in are being neglected. I find it odd that you keep offering the Connector in addition to your other products, when it just doesn’t seem to work, to a large extent.

    I know I’m being rather harsh, and I apologize. I just wish you’d focus more on making your present offerings more solid and usable, such as your hosting and the Connector, before releasing new products.

    Just my two cents. Tough love! That said, Bingo looks very awesome and forward-thinking. And perhaps I’m just not realizing that it’s part of an infrastructure that will help you to improve your other products!

    — Raymond Brigleb    606 days ago    #

  26. Raymond: thanks for the feedback. I’m investigating why we didn’t get back to you on your beta issue.

    What we’re focused on is bringing all of our products into a single interoperable whole. Bingo is part of this. All of our work on Solaris and ZFS and Containers is work to bolster and improve the Hosting component of Joyent. We’re making significant investments here to improve your experience with our products.

    Thank you for your investment in Joyent. We will make it worth it for you. Its clear we have more work to do.

    — David Young    606 days ago    #

  27. Thanks, David. Sorry about the harsh tone. Having only been a customer of yours for less than two years, I should spend more time being amazed at how far you’ve come in such a short span of time, and less time worrying that you’ll forget little guys like me.

    I do admire Joyent’s ambition and skills, and find your business very inspiring. Rest assured I will continue to drink the Kool-Aid, and I’m sure we’ll be first in line for the next “package offering!”

    — Raymond Brigleb    606 days ago    #

  28. David, Can you please contact me regarding a writeup on Bingo.
    -Vivek

    — Vivek Puri    606 days ago    #

  29. According to the following Sun web site

    http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/

    Thumper cost $2/GB. That’s the exact same price Joyent is offering BingoDisk for.

    Is Joyent making any money off of BingoDisk?

    — hank    606 days ago    #

  30. Hank: :)

    — David Young    606 days ago    #

  31. @David

    You guys are awesome!

    Hopefully I can get my business coverted to using BingoDisk by the end of the year.

    Hank

    — Hank    605 days ago    #

  32. @Raymond

    Customer service issues aside, there is a delicate balance between investing in current products and investing in new ones. The current products pay the bills and pay for the development of the new offerings.

    @ David

    I will be signing up soon!

    — jonto    605 days ago    #

  33. Can you fix the ‘white on black’ theme for bingodisk.com?

    I’m as leet as the next guy, but c’mon.

    — Dick Davies    602 days ago    #

  34. How do you differentiate Bingo from Strongspace? You can’t very well say that Strongspace is more secure, since that would imply that Bingo not entirely secure. The price per GB from that perspective is entirely skewed. Maybe I’m missing something. (Note that I am a happy Strongspace user.)

    — James Lindeman    600 days ago    #

  35. James: Bingo does public file delivery and is only accessible up-and-down by HTTP (it does HTTPS). Strongspace is completely closed, you can’t use it to host a podcast or images for a separate site.

    — Jason Hoffman    599 days ago    #

  36. WebDAV has around 10-20% protocol overhead compared to sftp or scp. It is a seriously bloated protocol. This means that you really only get 8 GB of data uploaded per month (give or take).

    Let’s assume you do some reading of your data and not just uploading … it’s conceivable that if you attempted to avoid all extra bandwidth charges you would have 48 GB of storage after one year.

    Now do the math – assuming 4 GB written per month, by the end of one year you will have spent, per GB/mo:

    4+2+1.3+1+.8+.66+.57+.5+.44+.4+.36+.33

    Divide by 12 and you get 1.03. So the cost of using bingodisk is $1.03/GB per month.

    It’s very interesting economics. I like the product (well, I would if it supported rsync) but don’t get blinded by the seemingly low price.

    — Arone Simi    587 days ago    #

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