Engineering Storage: Avoiding Design Mistakes

Published {$created} by Carsten Blum

Designing a reliable and scalable storage layer isn't just about spinning up a server and enabling FTP. Many engineering teams, particularly those leveraging 'ftp as remote storage service', make avoidable mistakes that compromise security, performance, and long-term maintainability. I’m seeing some common issues when teams try to build their own storage solutions, and I want to highlight a few critical areas to consider.

Authentication & Security: More Than Just a Password

The most frequent error I see revolves around authentication. While password-based authentication is supported (as noted on our features page), relying solely on it is a severe vulnerability. It’s a race against inevitable credential compromise. Modern systems must prioritize key-based authentication. SSH-ED25519 is a solid choice—it's performant and offers a good balance of security. Alternatives like SSH-RSA and ECDSA-SHA2-NISTP256 are acceptable, but ED25519 is increasingly the preferred standard. Beyond that, implement robust access controls. Don’t grant broad permissions – enforce the principle of least privilege. Think about the implications of data isolation. Each customer’s data should reside in completely separate containers to prevent cross-contamination, as we practice at ftpGrid. Data at rest encryption (AES-256) and encryption in transit (TLS 1.3) are essential as baseline security measures.

Scalability and Monitoring: Anticipate Growth

It's easy to overlook scalability considerations during the initial design phase. What happens when your user base grows significantly? Simply adding more storage won't suffice if your architecture isn’s ready. Bandwidth limitations, particularly when delivering large files, can choke performance. Furthermore, comprehensive monitoring is critical. Real-time storage and bandwidth monitoring (available through our dashboard) give early warnings of potential bottlenecks. Historical storage usage data helps predict future capacity needs. A reactive approach to these issues, rather than a proactive one, leads to frustrating outages and performance degradation. Consider data replication across multiple regions for increased reliability – a feature directly related to high availability. We’re always thinking about how to best serve our customers.

Operational Overhead and Feature Creep

Finally, building and maintaining a custom storage layer introduces significant operational overhead. Things like audit logging (critical for compliance and security incident response), account management (especially when dealing with multiple accounts – we support up to 500 per customer), and patching vulnerabilities consumes valuable engineering time. Consider whether the benefits of a custom solution outweigh the costs, especially when a managed service like ftpGrid can provide a similar functionality—and even some features like acting as a Wetransfer alternative—without the ongoing operational burden. Our pricing page demonstrates the value proposition of outsourcing these complexities.