I'm doing market research to see if anyone would be interested.
The idea is that you would purchase service for a small amount per month, perhaps $5 to $10 USD per month, and be given access to an entire single hard drive. Once you fill that hard drive with data, or at any time you choose otherwise, you can buy the hard drive for what was paid for it plus a small markup (around 5% to 8% or so), and then the hard drive will be packed securely and shipped to you.
Hardware would be a quad-core ARMv7 with 1 gigabyte of ram. You get full root access to it. OS choices would be Linux flavors initially, with more options in the future, although limited by needing to run on an ARM processor. Network connectivity would be unmetered inbound 100mbit (~10 megabytes/sec, this is 1.2 terabytes per day at 100% utilization), with 10 (1 megabyte/sec) megabit outbound. Drives will be NAS offerings from WD and Seagate.
You can take as long as you'd like to fill your drive. Get it filled in 3 days? No problem. Takes you two years? That's fine too. Just pay the $5-$10 monthly fee to keep your drive online. In the event that you cancel service, or what seems to be more likely in the hosting world, you just stop paying: no problem there either. We'll zero out your drive and make it available for another customer.
Maximum turn time for shipping your drive would be three business days. This would be "worst case"; ideally, drives will be shipped out same day if you buy your drive before the shipping cut-off for that day. Yes, international shipping will be available, and yes it will be pricey. But if you're stuck on an extremely slow connection, this might be a rather viable option for you to get a lot of data relatively quickly.
Your thoughts? Hit me with your questions/concerns.