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Comment by ac29 | Hacker News Reader

Does anything stop you from uploading 10s or 100s of TB? I recently crossed 1TB of storage use on S3 (which costs around $20/month) and am in the process of exploring alternatives.

I've never really understood how companies can offer "unlimited" storage at low prices.

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"Unlimited" space in any online service almost always means "there is a soft cap where we start threatening to shut down your service, but we won't tell you what it is ahead of time".

Actually quite an interesting point. Consider S3. They provide unlimited storage, but their software has to be able to keep up with the insane growth of data, albeit the hardware storage demand as well.

S3's cost to the consumer scales with the amount stored. That's different from Amazon, Dropbox, or Google, who offer enterprise-facing non-developer storage options at a flat rate for "unlimited".

They can do this because these enterprise-facing products offer fewer performance guarantees relative to their developer-facing products. But, ultimately, "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, in literally all of these products.

I would think enterprise offering would have a stricter SLA than developer-facing product. The only thing between Dropbox and Amazon is that there is no independent enterprise offering for S3, except Amazon pays a penalty for violating said SLA.

You still pay per TB. So yes, if you pay, you can have "unlimited" storage.

Overage? Like they can offer 30 people a terabyte of storage for every 10TB available because very few people will use their full quota.

Simple bandwidth would stop most people from uploading that much. It would take a long time at typical ISP speeds.

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