December 24, 2015

SaaS FTP Showdown: FTP Today vs. Hosted FTP

showdown Hosted FTP's multi-user plans start at $40 per month and claim to allow unlimted users at that price point. However, a close examination of their support documents indicate that there are indeed limits on all user types. But, the real concerns in the case of this provider is their infrastructure and their application security.

While FTP Today's plans start at $50 per month, those plans include far more in the area of functionality and security than what is offered by Hosted FTP. With FTP Today you are truly getting secure, custom developed applications and an expert managed file thansfer solution at a fair price.

Your FTP Cloud vs The Public Cloud

Hosted FTP takes advantage of inexpensive public cloud infrastructure from Amazon AWS. While AWS S3 storage isn’t fast, it is cheap and “durable” due to all objects being redundantly stored on multiple systems in the AWS infrastructure. You would think with a behemuth like Amazon AWS as their IaaS provider, you would be getting the best infrastructure possible. However, “durable” does not mean fault-tolerant, nor even highly available or self healing from any type of failure. And, object storage is not truly geared for high-performance (high IOPS) reads and writes. In Amazon's own words, “Just moving a system into the cloud doesn’t make it fault-tolerant or highly available.”

FTP Today's infrastructure provider Peak 10 has architected every component with high availability for automatic failover, from FTP Today's dedicated external firewalls down to the virtual machines (VMs or servers) themselves. All VM’s are provided the same level of high-availability (HA) that allows for automatic failover of any VM to different hardware should the need arise. This could be a complete hardware failure or something as simple as resource re-allocation. Most events that “move” a VM from one environment to another happen seamlessly without any interruption of service. FTP Today's storage platform utilizes EMC VNX SAN's, well known as the best of breed. Not only are their multiple reduncancies and efficiencies built in, but this is high-IOPS block storage, not cheap opbject storage.

Infrastructure

FTP Today	Hosted FTP
Servers – Virtual machines (VMware). Storage – Redundant storage SAN (Block Storage). High Availability – Automatic failover in the event of any hardware failure. SLA – 99.999% (Peak 10)	Servers – Virtual Machines (Amazon EC2). Storage – Object Storage (Amazon S3). High Availability – None. A single point of failure on each virtual server. SLA – 99.95% (Amazon EC2)

Security

FTP Today	Hosted FTP
Firewalls – Dedicated Fault Tolerant Hardware. Hacker Blacklist – Yes. Proprietary. Limit Access by Protocol – Yes. Proprietary. Limit Access by Country – Yes. Proprietary. Limit each User by IP – Yes. Proprietary. SSL Ciphers – Strongest possible. Independently graded A+. Enforce Encrypted Protocols – Yes. Administrator controls active protocols, e.g. FTPES required on port 21 (FTP off). All browser access is forced to HTTPS. Further controls available to restrict each user by protocol and by their remote IP address.	Firewalls – None. Hacker Blacklist – No. Limit Access by Protocol – No. Limit Access by Country – No. Limit each user by IP – No. SSL Ciphers – Weak and outdated. Independently graded F. Enforce Encrypted Protocols – No enforcement of encrypted access, whether via web browser or FTP client. All ports pertaining to HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPES and SFTP are open, leaving security up to the choice of the end user.

FTP Today

Hosted FTP

Firewalls – Dedicated Fault Tolerant Hardware.
Hacker Blacklist – Yes. Proprietary.
Limit Access by Protocol – Yes. Proprietary.
Limit Access by Country – Yes. Proprietary.
Limit each User by IP – Yes. Proprietary.
SSL Ciphers – Strongest possible. Independently graded A+.
Enforce Encrypted Protocols – Yes. Administrator controls active protocols, e.g. FTPES required on port 21 (FTP off). All browser access is forced to HTTPS. Further controls available to restrict each user by protocol and by their remote IP address.

Firewalls – None.
Hacker Blacklist – No.
Limit Access by Protocol – No.
Limit Access by Country – No.
Limit each user by IP – No.
SSL Ciphers – Weak and outdated. Independently graded F.
Enforce Encrypted Protocols – No enforcement of encrypted access, whether via web browser or FTP client. All ports pertaining to HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPES and SFTP are open, leaving security up to the choice of the end user.

Account Limits

FTP Today	Hosted FTP
Bandwidth – Unlimited. Simulatneous Connections – 25 per user. Workspaces – Unlimited, both private or shared. Admins control who shares what. File Size – Unlimited. Users – Unlimited. Admins – Unlimited on all plans ($50 & up).	Bandwidth – Limited to a small multiple of storage. Simulatneous Connections – 16 per user, 64 total. Workspaces – One per user. User controls their own shares. File Size – Limited to 1/4th of storage limit. Users – "Unlimited" means "400" per documentation. Admins – Unlimited at $160 & up.