Humyo: ghastly

On the face of it, Humyo looks like quite a good idea. About £4 per month for 100GB storage.

After using it for a few days I started to run into what turned out to be a show-stopping problem.

The Humyo software takes an age "working out what has changed", and does not provide any progress indication.

I thought this was just some funny little thing about the way it worked.

That was until I tried to get my data off of Humyo again.

And he we find the rub, and it's a biggy: Humyo is slow. Deathly slow.

Retrieving a file through the DAV interface runs at about 1 Mbit/s (one megabit per second). Not even 1 Mbyte/s. Really, 1 Mbit/s (125 kbyte/s). This is even slower than my out-in-the-sticks 2 Mbit/s broadband connection.

Reporting this to Humyo tech support, at first they claimed there was "packet loss near my host". This was fine except I had run my tests from 3 different co-lo boxes, all with proved excellent connectivity. Humyo then ran tests through the HTTP (public file sharing interface) which ran more quickly. Yeeeesss, but that is public file sharing. I was talking about the private authenticated DAV interface.

If we mount up Humyo using Davfs2, and try and do any operation which enumerates the directory hierarchy, we can only go through it at about one directory per second. And this is with empty directories.

No. Humyo is utterly ghastly.

At the present time AWS S3 seems to be quite a good idea. Access to AWS S3 seems to be reasonably good from the co-lo machine.