WHAAAAT? Unlimited storage for $4.99 a month not a viable business model?

The argument seems to be that average online storage needs are simply growing beyond what can be provided by a flat-fee unlimited plan.<p>I don't know if that's true, but there's something important the post doesn't address: the potential declining costs of providing online storage. Might the two not balance each other out for the foreseeable future?<p>I refer to this most excellent post by BackBlaze, which outlines how they do storage: <a href="http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h...</a><p>While we might not see many additional leaps of over 90% reduction in cloud storage costs, I (a) wonder how much headroom such innovation bought Backblaze, and (b) whether their main costs, hard drive, will keep pace with user demands.

Please don't shout in uppercase in the titles. The guidelines are here:<p><a href="http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html</a><p>I realise the original article uses this title, but a little more peaceful when posted to HN would be nice.

I had about 50GB of backed up data with mozy for that last 3 years, growing from ~20GB when i started. I've been paying $5 per month for almost 3 years now, which means I have paid ~50 a year (very rough to take out transaction fees and bandwidth fees, etc). That should buy them at least 320GB of average sata disk drives per year (assuming all money going into storage).<p>This means for "unlimited" they can recoup 6x the storage i was using per year through my fees. So the question becomes why it's not sustainable? Too large a company and not sustainable due to employee salaries? Not economical enough storage prices (ie using enterprise SAS disks rather than cheap SATA)? I'm guessing since they buy large quantities of disks, they could get drives for even cheaper than what you get on NewEgg.<p>This is why I believe that this model _is_ sustainable, assuming that it's done right. Also why I switched from Mozy to Backblaze because I felt that Mozy was gouging me by taking away their unlimited plan and replacing it with a tiered plan.

Given the change Mozy just instituted, my backup costs are going to go from $4.99/month to $23.99/month. This is an intolerable jump, regardless of the reasons they have for it. I don't expect something for nothing, but bait-and-switch is BS.<p>Looks like I'm in the market for a new backup solution.

If you are a Dropbox Pro user I think you get the packrat addon, which allows for unlimited history / undeletes. So, while the amount of files you can keep in your DB is limited, the amount of data that DB has to keep up with for you could get very large.<p>I don't see that they have anything to counter this in their model, and it kind of worries me that if people abuse this then they will remove the feature for all users, and I like my unlimited revisions.

This left me wondering; wouldn't use of deduplication storage backend (like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti</a>) lessen the incremental cost of servicing each new customer?<p>Couldn't it be well expected that, encrypted data aside, files with same content are often used by more than one persona?

I didn't read the article but wanted to comment on spideroak:<p>Really love their "realistic" pricing model, even cheaper with a .edu email address.<p>Had a lot of problems with CPU usage, may have been the thousands of files in my .git directories...<p>This leads me to support, they have been overwhelmed and it has been difficult getting then to review my logs. they gave me multiple months free due to my non usage but I decided to cancel when I found arq for mac.<p>I asked then to cancel my account and give me a years credit so I can give it a try in the future and they credited my account for a year... pretty cool.<p>Wish them the best of luck!<p>Written from my mobi...

Pardon the somewhat OT question, but do any of these services offer standard protocol support so that any OS can store data? I know DropBox supports Linux, and some services support OS X, but I haven't seen anything generic enough for my FreeBSD workstation, though the concept of cloud storage sounds great.<p>Give me NFS or SMB access if you must, but I'd love to get in on this cheap consumer cloud storage thing without resorting to lame hacks like using VMs or emulation due to lack of native access for my platform.

What is your experience with online backup solutions in general?<p>I tried mozy and a few others, but I always struggled with rather slow upload speed, and ultimately found the much easier way is to buy USB harddisk, which I hide in my workplace and just bring it home once per month to make backups. (I store online only a few files I am actually working on, using Dropbox).

I think this (and SpiderOak in general) is pretty instructive for a company starting out and looking to find a way to generate revenue. I plan to roll out a service (unrelated) later this year and will be looking at SpiderOak for a compelling delivery/pricing model.