FAQ

Here you will find the answers for the most popular questions.

Want to try DB Forest? Reach out to our team on Discord

1. Why would I deploy my project on DB Forest platform and not on the provider’s website?

• You can go directly to most providers websites after having found the best benchmarks on our protocol. But if you do that your not guaranteed the same service as everyone in the product category. Also we create general tooling that works with all clouds.

• For instance we are building a universal terraform adapter so you don’t need to rewrite all your deployment automation code you can just change a variable.

2. What do the decentralized validators do?

• Validators define requirements for each product line. Providers register on a smart contract how much inventory they have of a product type. Each time a provider registers the validators will automatically test them by impersonating a new customer once at the point of registration and then again at random throughout time. Validators perform a series of feature completeness checks as well as compute performance benchmarks and egress speed tests but the details of this vary between product lines.

3. How does the money flow from customer to providers? Where is money stored?

• Currently customers make purchases on the blockchain where their money is deposited into a smart contract from which only they or the provider can withdraw. The provider can withdraw only the amount of money that is due for them as time elapses ( price per second multiplied by seconds since beginning of agreement). And the user can withdraw any remaining money at any time.

• But we will soon release a web2 only credit card based purchasing experience which will likely be based on the typical stripe connect system.

4. How does DB Forest make money?

• The business model is not finalized we are happy to get feedback currently considering these three options:

1. Ask providers to pay for the performance testing and certifying we do every time they add a new instance type.

2. Very simply add a % fee on the savings made.

3. (Tokenize Collateralization for providers) : token that is used for the collateralization of providers so that any cost burden stays on the provider and users don’t see it. B/C we want to make sure that we are getting the lowest prices here.

5. How can resellers give a lower price?

• One strategy is that they will make a huge long term commit with a cloud provider getting a big discount vs the listed spot price and then they resell that to you and many other people.

6. Is DB Forest price different than the price of providers on their official website?

• We do not control the prices directly. Providers can set the prices as they like although if they make them more expensive then they would not be competitive. The whole goal is that we want to create a real competitive environment. But we will release a price comparison tool that takes the best prices from our market and compares to the public listed prices from major clouds outside and they are typically 70-90% cheaper.

7. Why DB Forest is a decentralized platform? Why web3 and not web2?

• The decentralization is important to ensure that at no future time if the company goes public and replace the founders, it could change the results of the system.

8. Are you GDPR compliant?

• Just like any other cloud provider you will need to list the service provider and infrastructure providers companies in your privacy policy. But you do not need to list DB Forest itself because we never handle the data.

9. Do you offer tech support?

• Yes, we do offer tech support for every project deployed on our platform. You can reach out to our team on Discord or through our website.

10. Who to contact regarding feature requests?

• Please contact our COO Maria (@polkadot7 on Discord or @dmarusia in Telegram).

11. Do you offer a free trial?

• Yes we do! We live by the principle "try before you buy", so you are encouraged to message our team so we can give you free access to our platform to try it out. Moreover, you will be able to try more expensive Database provider for free and then migrate your data to the cheaper provider to use it afterwards.

12. Can I use it like firebase with simple rest API calls?

• We have deployed https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v12/ for some customers who don’t want to do database, with further demand we are happy to add a combination as a product.

13. Can I migrate away from dbForest?

• Yes, Egress to other non dbForest providers is also included.

• In the near future we will also Open Source our multi cloud frontend so you can self host that also.

14. How does the project prevent vendor lock-in?

• By continually testing all providers in the network that they follow the standard minimum defined feature set for a product stack as well as ensuring they have the minimum needed egress included in the price.

Still have questions? Reach out to our team on Discord