Forum Moderators: goodroi
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.
Google Now Selling Expanded Storage [cnbc.com]
When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution.
Google blog [googleblog.blogspot.com]
That would make perfect sense from a consumer perspective, but not Google's perspective.
The vast majority of people never even use a fraction of the 3 gigs of email space because email doesn't take up much room. It means Google can advertise they offer 3 gigs of email space, but they hardly ever have to actually supply 3 gigs.
Pictures and video are totally different, people could easily use up 3 gigs worth of space with multimedia because the file sizes are so huge, and getting bigger as larger megapixel cameras appear. If they advertised 3 gigs of free storage for multimedia, they'd frequently have to actually supply 3 gigs.
Why do I care to have 2.8 GB of email space? I don't, I keep my email clean. Give me 3.5 GB of space for photos and .3 GB for email.
You don't get enough email then...or don't store enough record of the email. I can burn through a 2.8GB email account in a year if I'm not careful about deleting things that I don't need. Right now mine sits at just over 1 GB...after deleting several photos and screenshots that get sent to me on a regular basis and were taking up 500MB+.
I'm glad that they're rolling out the expanded storage. I really wanted to like Amazon S3. Been using it for storing photos, etc. for a while, but it's more of a headache than it's worth because there are so many hacked solutions for accessing it and none of them are really very elegant. Pricing seems a little steep - $500 a year for 250GB when I can buy a 5 500GB drives for $500 and just mirror things and keep a couple offsite if needed.
That's what I was thinking. The prices seem, well pricey. Especailly for online storage.
Indeed, quite pricey. I do believe there is going to be a demand for more GB on the part of many consumers, but they can purchase external hard drives that are easier to use and cheaper.
Ah, but G is a blue plate brand name, so they get to charge the Ralph Lauren type prices. Get over it.
But, from the story, there is no indication that Google's space will have an API. If it did, that would be great.
