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I've connected on a colocated server that's on a switch with a gigabit pipe from Hurricane Electric, which peers with SpiderOak's ISP. This should rule out ISP throttling completely, as the only ISPs involved are transit providers. I've only ever heard of throttling from consumer ISPs. I might try from a server with premium bandwidth from GCP or something later though.

> I don't buy remote hosted storage, so when I saw $12/month for 1TB I was like "whoa, that's way too cheap to be reliable".

The standard market rate is actually closer to $10/TB and that's from the big providers like Google.

> It's very hard for me to imagine how a company can have a large number of customers, each with 1TB of highly redundant data with high service uptime and immediate support, for $12/month.

It's actually not as hard as you think. I built and colocate my own 56TB rackmount and over 4 or so years (the warranty on the drives) it works out to around $2.5 per raw TB, inclusive of all hardware and bandwidth. Optimize that for storage (a lot of my server costs are compute), scale it up, assume the server will live 8 years or so until you replace it and you should be able to get that below a dollar per raw TB. Replicate a few times and you're done.

> The prices of different providers seems almost spastic, running from $1.50 to $150 for a terabyte of backup. Unless there's very good reasons for the variance in price, something seems fishy.

The reasons are variations in replication (for example 3 copies vs 2 copies vs no copies vs 10+3 erasure coding), support, location and bandwidth prices I imagine.

Thanks a lot for the response, it's nice to hear from you and it sounds like you've done a lot to improve, just from the numbers.

> I think perhaps you might mean 2015 instead of 2016.

Looking back, yeah, you're right. Sorry about that.

> If I've found the correct case, we did at least suspend billing when the issue started and eventually issued a full refund.

Yep, that sounds like me.

> If for some reason you would ever like to try SpiderOak again on me, you're welcome to contact me directly, or write to [email protected] where these days we do a pretty good job of taking care of everyone.

I've downloaded the latest client and I'm running it on OS X right now. There doesn't appear to be any change. The client just sits for long stretches of time doing absolutely nothing, just like it used to (no disk activity, no CPU, no network activity). The UI shows a bunch of pending "actions" which the logs show the server has already confirmed. I'll gather some more details and email you the results tomorrow at some point.

EDIT: I've tested with a dedicated server with a gigabit Hurricane Electric pipe (notably, HE peers with WANSecurity, the AS that announces SpiderOak's IPs) and I'm able to get 80Mb/s. On my 30Mbit Comcast connection at home, I'm able to get around half speed (though I'm able to saturate it to other services). I've emailed you more details but this is more for the benefit of others.

While I'd prefer the ability to saturate my pipe completely, this is good enough that it's no longer a huge problem for me.

The problem with Borg is that it requires an actual mounted FS or SSH (with a live mounted FS on the other end). You can't just point it at offline storage.

Totally a great option if you do have live storage to backup to but personally I don't have a full server worth of disk spare at any given time.

I'm the customer in question and I'm totally fine with what he said. Nothing personal was disclosed, only that SpiderOak wasn't able to find the issue (which I said myself) and that billing was suspended (I neglected to mention) and I got a refund (did mention).

If he'd named my ISP, location, address or something like that I'd say it's inappropriate but I think this is totally find and I actually appreciate that he went to the trouble.