During the past couple of days, a couple of popular web services have removed restrictions on storage space or bandwidth. Flickr started by announcing that the 2 gigabyte bandwidth limit for Pro users was being lifted. There’s no increase in price. This is a great move because now it’s not unreasonable to have a complete back-up of your uncompressed image archive online.
A couple of days later, online backup provider Mozy began offering unlimited storage. Previously, their top-tiered plan cost $10/month for 60 gigs of space. Now, it’s $5/month for unlimited space. That’s seriously great if you’re looking for a good way to keep a remote backup of all your files.
In the world of web hosting, you need to beware of offers of “unlimited space” or “unlimited bandwidth,” because there are always catches. But now reputable web services are offering similar deals that are completely legit. Let’s just hope they all stick around for a while.
Posted in Technology
Paul December 15, 2006, 3:06 pm
These are great, of course.
The interestful angle here is that services like this are (in my opinion) taking the heat off of webhosts. Used to be for photos you needed to:
– buy hosting
– buy domain name
– buy or download software to drive it
– configure and install software
– upload photos
– test things out
– publicize
Now for photos, you can:
– buy flickr account
– upload photos
– publicize
That’s a pretty big shift, when you think about it. Now with the unlimited stuff, they’re almost begging the question, “Do I really need to store 2GB of photos on my computer at all?”
COD December 15, 2006, 5:47 pm
//Do I really need to store 2GB of photos on my computer at all?”//
Yes, because none of these services actually guarantee that your data is safe. Somebody could hack your account and delete everything, or server crash + bad backup procedures could hose you, etc.
What I’m looking for is a way to backup from Flickr / Gmail etc to something like Amazon S3 without having to download the data to my PC first. Some sort of direct copy ability would go a long way towards making me feel comfortable leaving all my data on a web based service.