*** Potential bias alert: I'm involved in both the Tahoe project at allmydata.org and the commercial online storage service at Allmydata.com ***
I wanted to add to the above comment that we (Allmydata.com) also tried out a business model where the software agent on each machine was a peer storage node on the storage grid. For many of the reasons that have already been mentioned, this model did not gain acceptance. Technically, peer node churn is logistically complex to efficiently manage, and socially it is difficult for people to accept storage of strangers' data (encrypted, encoded, or not). We now use the p2p storage grid only on servers that we manage and the clients are effectively encryption and transfer agents. This gives us a cost-advantage on the server side (easy to manage, cheap hardware can be used), but doesn't expose us to some of the other marketing and technical issues.
Slashdot Mirror
*** Potential bias alert: I'm involved in both the Tahoe project at allmydata.org and the commercial online storage service at Allmydata.com ***
I wanted to add to the above comment that we (Allmydata.com) also tried out a business model where the software agent on each machine was a peer storage node on the storage grid. For many of the reasons that have already been mentioned, this model did not gain acceptance. Technically, peer node churn is logistically complex to efficiently manage, and socially it is difficult for people to accept storage of strangers' data (encrypted, encoded, or not). We now use the p2p storage grid only on servers that we manage and the clients are effectively encryption and transfer agents. This gives us a cost-advantage on the server side (easy to manage, cheap hardware can be used), but doesn't expose us to some of the other marketing and technical issues.