re: Linux users complaining of lack of clients, check out insynchq.com. I've been a happy user for the last few months.
Save more with Google Drive
231–240 of 413 posts
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#232They are offering a product at 1/10th of the price of their competitors. That comes at a cost. Customer support is already bad enough, my guess is the infrastructure isn't that great so they can price it cheaply. We wouldn't trust a cheap VPS provider with our data if they were offering storage at this price. What magical thing Google has that suddenly makes us all safe at this price point?
> They are offering a product at 1/10th of the price of their competitors. That comes at a cost.
Not really. I don't understand at all what makes it so expensive. As a student with no experience nor money I'm very hesitant, but I've actually gone over the costs of building my own online backup company. Even with harddives that never go offline (thus always consume power) and using consumer-priced hardware (no hardware at manufacturing costs), I think I can do it cheaper than Google does right now. The only requirement is having customers pay for at least ~15TB of storage space before it becomes profitable to host. At this "profitable" point I'm still not even making enough to feed myself, but it's a start.
Plus, Google can oversell their drives (and probably by a lot because there are only a few subscription types available), something which is not possible with pay-as-you-consume services like Amazon S3.
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#233I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…
Google will not drop Drive because it goes along with their almost web only OS, Chrome OS. And many other services are leaning on drive, +, picasa, gmail, android apps, etc...
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Download and then uploading a terabyte of data can be very expensive depending on where you live Dropbox doesn't have a 1TB plan, but 2x500GB costs $1000/year. On Drive, it costs $100/year. That's a difference of $900/year. I don't know where you live, but around here $900/year buys you a pretty fucking good connection, with blackjack and hookers included. it can also take a very long time. So what? You can still use…
I live in the Bay Area and I pay about $800/year for 120KB/s upload (AT&T U-Verse). Certainly no blackjack and hookers included.
And then I did the math and realised I pay $1735.54 per year for my cable Internet...
300 down / 20 up with a 1 TB cap doesn't come cheap when no competition exists at those speeds. If it were even offered in my area, fibre from the same company is north of $3000/year, and for that all I get is symmetric uplink.
Still, at 300 down, 1 TB = 8388608 mbits / 300 mbits/s = 466 minutes or just under 8 hours. And luckily, my monthly cap is 1 TB. (Also lucky: I don't download 24/7 to hit that cap in under 8 hours.)
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#235Does paying for Google Drive make your account eligible to be synced over MS Exchange via Google Apps Sync since you're now a paying customer of Google?
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#236I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…
Does it matter? If Dropbox turned the lights out tomorrow, I wouldn't lose any data, my files would just stop syncing across machines. I'd just have to install a new file sync client and point it to my Dropbox folder.
The barriers to switching away from Dropbox are based more on the number of products with Dropbox API integrations, and not on the switching costs for file sync.
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#237Dropbox is $9.99 for 100GB for comparison. Drive still doesn't have a Linux Client.
+1, I don't get it. I had to fallback to Dropbox/Ubuntu One for cloud storage.
Too bad for them, they lost a customer.
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#238What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3, and even comparable to Amazon Glacier.
Google Drive: $10/1000GB = $0.01/GB
Amazon S3: $0.85/GB for the first 1 TB
Amazon Glacier: $0.01/GB
(all prices per month)
Sure, there are caveats. Google Drive is not programmatically accessible like S3. The terms of service probably disallow the same use cases as S3. The pricing of Google Drive almost certainly depends on users not using all their storage. Google may rate-limit heavy users or do something else to discourage people from fully utilizing the product. etc. But the point still stands: 3rd party products built on top of Amazon's infrastructure will not be able to beat this price without significant competition from Amazon.
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#239Most people would use this for photos, in which case using Flickrs free 1tb makes this look extortionately priced.
Re: Save more with Google Drive
#240If nothing else this just exposes how high Dropbox's margins must be.
I think Dropbox actually spends a fair bit more on bandwidth because of all the syncing. As far as I know Google has no desktop client (and if they do they failed to offer it to me), whereas with Dropbox it's really the way to go.
But in general yeah I agree, the margins of all these storage companies are very high. As I've said in other comments here, I think I can do it cheaper using consumer-priced hardware (let alone on a huge scale with hardware bought at near manufacturing costs).