Joyent

FAQs

Is FTP Available As Well?

No. FTP is a completely insecure means of file transfer – your username, password and the files themselves are sent “in the clear” and can be viewed and captured by anyone who is on the Internet between you and the FTP server you’re connected to.

Instead, we offer SFTP (Secure FTP) access to account owners. SFTP is an entirely different protocol in which your username, password and files are transmitted over secure on encrypted channels. Almost all FTP clients also support the SFTP protocol (FTP on port 21 and SFTP on port 22), so you should have no problems connecting.

Can You Recommend an SFTP Program for My Desktop?

Filezilla and WinSCP (both Windows), Fugu & Cyberduck (both OS X) are popular and free. If you’d prefer the support of a commercial product, we recommend purchasing either SftpDrive (Windows) or Transmit (OS X). Of course, SFTP is also freely available in all command line shells.

Why Is SFTP & Shell Access Restricted to the Account Owner?

Unix permissions are hierarchical. In secure set-ups such as Strongspace, your area is completely locked down to a single user. So only the account owner may login via SFTP.

You can provide unlimited friends, family and co-workers with a read-only login to access your files using their Web browser, and on most plans, you can create users with full upload/rename/delete privileges.

Can I Change My Plan Later?

Yes, you can upgrade or change your plan at any time to suit your needs, so there’s no lock-in – it’s as easy as clicking a button.

What Is a GiB?

Hard drive space actually comes in 1024 byte “blocks”, and the correct prefixes are ones like kibi-, mebi- and gibi- (versus kilo-, mega-, and giga-, all of which are units of a 1000). So a GiB is simply the accurate and slightly larger cousin of the Gigabyte (1 Gibibyte = 1.073741824 Gigabytes).

Can I Change My Sub Domain Later?

Sorry, not without deleting your existing account and signing up for a new account, so please choose carefully!

What Sub Domain Should I Use?

Try to choose a sub domain which best describes your use of the account. Here are some suggestions:

Is There a Limit to the File Size I Can Upload?

This depends on many factors, including how you’re uploading the file, as well as the speed and stability of your Internet connection.

We’ve successfully uploaded files as large as 90MiB through a Web browser over broadband, but somewhere around 5-20MiB is a safe guideline. Obviously a slow Internet connection will greatly reduce this number.

If you’re uploading your files via SFTP/rsync (both available to the account owner only), your only real limits are the available space on your account, and the stability of your internet connection.

Can I Have Public Files That Don’t Require a Login?

No. Strongspace is designed with security and privacy as a priority. You have complete control over what each user on your account can do. This also allows us to offer Strongspace plans without any restrictions on bandwidth usage.

What Character Set Should I Use for SFTP?

If you upload a lot of files over SFTP with ‘international’ (non-ASCII) characters in the file name (e.g. ‘café-business-plan.gif’), you need to make sure your SFTP client uses UTF-8 for its character set.

We’ve noticed that some SFTP clients do not default to UTF-8, and the way they name non-ASCII file names can cause problems managing those files through the Web browser interface.

We certainly hope to find a more accommodating solution in the near future.

What Server Hardware Are You Using?

Strongspace is built on the Sun Fire X4500 “Thumper” running OpenSolaris. The X4500 provides 48 SATA disks and we manage them with ZFS thanks to RAIDZ-2 (Dual Parity RAID). This solution provides us with significantly faster throughput than experienced with our previous architecture on Dell/EMC and with far greater redundancy.

Does Strongspace Have an Encrypted File System?

No. We encrypt any sensitive data (credit cards, login passwords, etc) using Blowfish, but the files you store in your home directory are not encrypted. They’re as safe and secure as any other file on a well-locked-down Unix system, but they are not encrypted. We’re looking into the possibility of an encrypted file solution, but have no fixed plan when (or if) this will implemented.