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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

The argument seems to be that average online storage needs are simply growing beyond what can be provided by a flat-fee unlimited plan.

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?

I refer to this most excellent post by BackBlaze, which outlines how they do storage: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h...

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.

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I think there is a difference between 'unlimited' and 'absurdly high.' Many hosting providers offer 'unlimited' storage but limit how fast you can upload -- this effectively caps their storage but makes it high enough for most users to never care. Instead of dubious 'unlimited' marketing I would prefer up-front pricing. GMail tells you exactly how much storage it offers for free with the idea that this is much too high for a normal user to touch. Much easier to deal with than an 'unlimited' service that breaks down under load.

I've backed up a few hundred GB with Backblaze. I think the implication being made here is unfair. I'm much more likely to believe any issues with my upload were caused by shady AT&T QoS.

You know the kind. Goto any speedtest site and somehow you're getting exactly 12MB down, 3MB up, but it never really seems to add up that way anywhere else. Even to my own office, which I know has an extra 100MB to burst, yet somehow my downloads from the data-center across town are more likely to end up in the 3MB range 99% of the time.

The model I had in my head was web hosting providers with "unlimited" data storage vs. ones with 1TB of storage. Even though a normal user would probably get nowhere near 1TB, it gives the company a fallback on what 'acceptable' usage is. If the price ever does go down, they can always adjust the limit.

The likely reason Speedtest doesn't add up is because the file you are downloading to test with is hosted by your ISP.

Speedtest was originally made to test the 'last mile', assuming your ISP's connections to the rest of the world is always faster than that. In most cases that is true, but it is possible it isn't in your area.

As a particular clear example of that, here's my little write up on Speedtest.net usage in Rwanda: http://blog.nyaruka.com/stuff-0

Explicit pricing is better for moderate users and worse for heavy users. "Unlimited" effectively subsidizes heavy users by overcharging moderate users. As a heavy user, I'm a fan of "unlimited".

It depends. When "Unlimited" service is sold with a Terms of Service that includes an "Excessive Use Policy" like Mozy's [1], the heavy user is operating in an ambiguous zone where continued use of the service at the advertised price is at the whim of the provider.

We've seen this with unlimited data plans with the cable ISPs; they're not really unlimited.

To me, it's similar to having a traditional credit card versus one with no pre-set spending limit. Which would you rather have? The latter has a limit, you just don't know what it is until you hit it.

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[1] http://mozy.com/terms/ "....excessive use of the Service, which means usage over a given period far exceeds the average level of usage by users of the Service generally..."

> the heavy user is operating in an ambiguous zone where continued use of the service at the advertised price is at the whim of the provider

That suggests an interesting business model where: we sell everyone on 'Unlimited', then we wait to see who is the most egregious customer, and drop off the ones on the top of the pyramid (and keep the revenue positive customers).

Reminds me of how the cellular operators used to be towards roaming: sure, you can roam, just don't do it so much that we cancel your contract.

That's a separate issue - discounting the value of the service based on uncertainty over its continuance. But even within the limits of the unstated limit ("excessive use"), the heavier users are still subsidized by the light users.

You can still freeload up and until you hit the limit.

FYI -- The backblaze storage hardware is similar (at least conceptually--specifics differ greatly) to what all the big self hosted backup companies (Mozy, Carbonite, SpiderOak, etc.) do. Custom hardware and data center storage software is the minimum price of entry for the industry these days.

The issue here I think is that "unlimited" really isn't unmetered and it never really was. The industry has often seen that marketing gimmick accompanied with abundant exclusions, fine print, and far less ethical tricks like upload rate limiters, that effectively impose limits behind the scenes.

Costs of storage are of course declining rapidly, however so far the massive increase in available bandwidth and storage needs for customers is simply growing MUCH faster.

Part of the catch-22 here is also that with decreased storage costs for online storage providers (that increasingly are building their clusters with consumer component hard drives) keeps an even pace with decrease in cost for home-storage and the amount of data users are wanting to upload.

This is why I'm really liking Crashplan as a storage service; they offer the ability to use their software to backup to your friends' drives (and vice versa). It perhaps doesn't work out well for everyone, but I have enough friends that keep up with the latest hardware that I am assured of finding someone with which I can trade backup storage. (My alternate plan was dropping off a disk / picking up the old disk whenever I visited my relatives every couple of weeks!)

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