[rarrrrrr]

After looking through our records, I think perhaps you might mean 2015 instead of 2016. I took over the company that year and some things have changed. At the time customer satisfaction ratings were around 84%, and we're in the high 90s now. If I've found the correct case, we did at least suspend billing when the issue started and eventually issued a full refund.

I'm sorry we weren't able to determine the cause of the slowness for you. Troubleshooting an end-to-end encrypted product is hard because you can't just see everything that's happening by looking at the server. We have seen ISPs deny or aggressively throttle connections to our destination networks. Palo Alto firewalls classify traffic to SpiderOak as an online backup service and often block it outright or put it at least priority. I'm not saying that these were necessarily the causes in your situation.

SpiderOak keeps improving and the 2017 road map is action packed. If for some reason you would ever like to try SpiderOak again on me, you're welcome to contact me directly, or write to [e-mail] where these days we do a pretty good job of taking care of everyone. Otherwise I'm glad you've found backup solutions you're happy with. Cheers!

[Veratyr]

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 [e-mail] 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.

[wamatt]

Have you tried connecting through a VPN? That could potentially rule out ISP throttling.

[Veratyr]

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.

[devwastaken]

Hey, just wanna say I appreciate the time you've taken to reply, even though you're putting yourself out there. It would be really great if more CEO's and personnel could come here to have honest discussions and respond to information about things they're particularly knowledgeable about.

[koolba]

> Hey, just wanna say I appreciate the time you've taken to reply, even though you're putting yourself out there.

As a customer / user, it's always good to have additional feedback channels.

> It would be really great if more CEO's and personnel could come here to have honest discussions and respond to information about things they're particularly knowledgeable about.

If it's at the expense of having an actual support channel then that's be terrible. More and more the only way to get a response from a companies is to make a stink on some form of social media (including HN).

I'm not saying SpiderOak is in that category (haven't used them so can't say). But responding to Q&A about your product on HN is not a substitute for responding to email, chat, phone, or having a feedback forum on your own site.

[anotherevan]

Hey rarrrrrr, looks like it might be time to update the about box on your hacker news profile. :-)

> a co-founder at SpiderOak: A "zero knowledge" encrypted, space efficient, multi-computer, perpetual offsite backup, sync, and sharing solution

[rarrrrrr]

Done, thank you! We'll probably be playing whack-a-mole on this for the next couple months...

[Aaronn]

The "Welcome to SpiderOak" email that users receive when they first signup for the service mentions the "Zero Knowledge Technology".

[jacquesm]

Another one:

https://spideroak.com/manual/spideroak-on-mobile

quickly found using:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aspideroak.com+zero+kn...

[agumonkey]

Seems like you're doing hard and honest work. One thing remains odd to me, the slow communication part. Do you need more people to handle customer relationships ? or was it difficulties in admitting technical issues to them that caused such delays ?

I don't know how I would react, but from a comment I think I'd like being told soon, even if it was a failure (in that case it's not even clear if you were failing or if it was some system in the middle) from a company I paid. I'd be less angry after 3 days with a disappointing news than after a month.

Then it's just me; I don't know how other feel about this. I'd be curious to know though.

[msh]

Any plans to support upload from mobile devices?

Thats my main issues with spideroak.

[hluska]

Let me see if I have this straight. In response to a story from a customer, you went through all of your records and then shared information about the case in public.

I'm glad your customer satisfaction scores are higher, but I'd rather not share any of my information with you. I'm not the op, but if I was, I would feel rather violated.

[jacquesm]

> I'm not the op, but if I was, I would feel rather violated.

Well then don't choose a public forum to vent a complaint, and since you're not the OP it doesn't matter anyway.

Turnabout is fair play: if you go into a thread about a product and make a strong play that their customer service sucks and then an officer of that company steps in and does what they can to see if there is a way to re-engage you on their dime that's about as good as you could possibly expect. On top of that he did not volunteer any info that wasn't already in the OP's post except for a possible correction of the date.

So you're wrong, twice.

FWIW absolutely no affiliation whatsoever with Spideroak.

[rarrrrrr]

Thank you for the feedback. I'm sensitive to this issue too.

For what it's worth, we do have very strict policy about what information regular customer service staff can access or share publicly (i.e. none in most cases) and how someone who calls in must establish beyond a reasonable doubt that they really are the original customer before we will communicate with them. We're very careful about allowing any customer data to exist in 3rd party systems. We don't even use Google Analytics. https://medium.com/@mccamon/yeah-we-ditched-google-2fa644578...

That said, many people also expect customer support delivered over Twitter so some flexibility is required. In this case I made a judgement call and decided to answer.

[tjallingt]

All he said was that they refunded the guy, seems like information that is pretty OK to share publicly especially in response to the claim that their customer support was terrible. In addition to that the person who commented shared a large amount of information about the support ticket themselves so it seems like they are fine with sharing at least that much information about this case.

All-in-all this hardly seems like a reason to feel "violated"...

[Veratyr]

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.

[verytrivial]

Erm, they continued a public conversation about the customer that the customer publicly started themselves regarding customer service, and they kept the details to the delivery of the customer service and discussed the experience all customers were probably having at the time. Context matters.

[peteretep]

What private information about the user was shared?