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Google Rolls Out Online Storage Services
An anonymous reader writes "The associated press reports that Google is slated to provide online storage at a price. From the article: 'Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections. The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage.' Is this too expensive for what there offering, or are you going to make use of it?"
You can already pay with PicasaWeb. That allows you to have more that 1GB. The 1GB option will likely stay free as a way to attract customers.
The Forbes article didn't link to it, so here's the official announcement from Google:
- to-get-more-storage.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/simple-way
Also, here's the link for actually purchasing the additional space:
https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage
At the time being, this doesn't seem to be a standalone storage service (the summary was kind of ambiguous about this), but rather a way to upgrade the space you have on additional Google services (gmail, Picasa, etc.). In any case, I'd really love it if they eventually came out with a storage service that you could use as a CVS/SVN repository.
At $0.15/gb/month, S3 is already priced better than Google - especially considering you only pay for what you use with no need to pre-pay for a bunch of storage in advance.
S3 is really a different service - you can store anything on it, whereas the Google storage can apparently only be used from Google apps (for now). The other advantage of using software like Jungle Disk with S3 is that your data is encrypted before even leaving your machine, and neither Amazon nor anyone else can access it.
All this is is an opportunity to buy extra space for GMail/Picassa/etc. beyond what you already get on their servers for free. It is not an online storage service like Xdrive, but an equivalent to buying Hotmail Plus.
S3Fox:4 7
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/32
Integrates an upload/download interface for Amazon S3 into Firefox. Very slick and very free.
Currently, I get a little over 250 GB from Dreamhost and I'm paying $120 a year for it. I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, so I'm not sure how much a new customer gets (Dreamhost increases the storage each week), but I'm sure it's less expensive than Google's rates. I have 199 GB uploaded at the moment, which is a near-100% backup of my DVD collection (in 1-gig-per-movie MP4 format.) Dreamhost supports mounting storage as WebDAV, FTP, or rsync to transfer files. (And of course there's web hosting included.)
The problem with large amounts of storage isn't the amount of space, but the time taken to upload. It took a week to upload my movie files to Dreamhost on a medium-speed DSL connection, and it would take several solid days of downloading to get it back.
Comment of the year
Holy bejeesus, I can't believe you got modded up for that completely misleading comment. It's not $99 just for storage, it's also email, one-click publishing of web pages and photo pages. Groups. Automatic calander, bookmark, address book, email and some third party syncing. Easy Mac and PC (and Web) access to upload and download from anywhere, video tutorials, backup application, etc... the list is very long.
.Mac. It just works.
Check it out.
I use it every day and love it. I have found no better coupling than iLife and
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin