![]() The company has also built its own software, which doesn’t require a load balancer to deal with inbound traffic. To reduce its own costs, BackBlaze for example, builds its own storage pods out of consumer hard drives, so it doesn’t have to lease space from a cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft. Every cloud storage service, limited or not, is paying for every gigabyte, which means costs go up as people consume more storage space. The challenge now is to keep storage and related costs low, and being able to stomach the notion of having some unprofitable users. Online backup services such as BackBlaze and Carbonite, for instance, have been doing it for years. With the potential for more than a billion cloud storage users to exist within the decade, there is a huge need for truly unlimited solutions. Moving on, digital culture is growing quickly, and users will require more and more storage space as they increase their own digital footprints. Industry leaders, such as Dropbox and Box, should be similarly scrutinised in this exploration of unlimited. And these concerns are not unique to Amazon, either. The choice to use synchronisation methods raises a number of concerns. Unlike cloud storage providers who maintain storage exclusively on the cloud, synchronisation is predicated on the space available on a user’s hard drive. This means that when a user uploads files to the cloud, they are first stored on a user’s hard drive. The first - a US$59.99 per year unlimited ‘everything’ storage plan - while it claims to be unlimited, this 'everything' option is founded on synchronisation. Why is that? Because it, like its competitors, is not truly unlimited.Īmazon Cloud Drive, in all honesty, comes at two levels. However, like most sparkly things, the offer is not quite as spectacular as it first appears. Last March, Amazon announced its own unlimited cloud storage system, committing itself as one of the market’s most affordable solutions. Then there’re cloud storage providers who claim that their storage platforms are unlimited when in all likelihood they know that they’re not (just like that of my data provider). Maintaining unlimited customers is not viable for its business, noted Bitcasa. To continue using the service, users will have to migrate to either a 1TB or 10TB storage plan, states the company. In response, Microsoft has now placed a 1 terabyte limit on OneDrive users who have Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscriptions.Ĭloud storage vendor Bitcasa has also announced that it will be dropping its infinite storage option after November 15, in tandem with an upgrade of its infrastructure to a fully regionalised architecture. Some of them exceeded 75 terabytes per user. The tech giant said a small number of Office 365 users had used the cloud storage service to back up several computers and upload entire movie libraries. The company began offering unlimited data plans in October 2014. Microsoft recently became the latest example, when it pulled the plug on unlimited cloud storage plans for Office 365 subscribers thanks to a select group of data hoarders. They say to put your files on their servers and you’ll never even have to think about what a gigabyte holds.īut before long, these companies realise they can’t hold up their end of the bargain, seemingly shocked by how much storage people actually use. By 2017, iHS iSuppli predicts there will be more than one billion personal cloud storage users around the world.Ĭonsidering the purchasing power of these digital consumers, it’s no surprise that cloud storage’s biggest players are improving their systems to gain a competitive edge.Įvery so often, a cloud storage provider promises endless space for your precious data. Now that is one interesting market space. Unlimited is just a word and it doesn’t really mean anything here as the provider has cleverly weaved in several limitations.”Įvidently, in many instances, businesses today tend to “over” promise their offers in attempts to gain more customers like those vendors in unlimited cloud storage space. In her own words, “Sure I enjoyed a lot more bandwidth but there’s always a catch somehow somewhere with such offer. Luckily for me, a former colleague had taken up the offer and shared that the offer was not as it made out to be. So rather than jumping straight and take up the offer, I asked around. However, at my age, dazzling incentives and promises such as this one are typically met with trepidation. Not too long ago, I received an email from my data provider offering me an upgrade from my current plan to an “unlimited” package that requires me to pay an extra of only RM10.
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