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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

> In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work.

How do you handle such users at MediaFire?

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There's nothing you can do other than move away from unlimited storage. The model, as the OP states, works well initially, however over time, "power users" emerge to want to make use of unlimited. The only choice is to remove unlimited storage as a fixed subscription fee. You may have metered billing (unlimited storage but you are charged per GB) or to do away with unlimited storage all together.

Keep in mind, that change is great for the business and 99.9% of the users. The business saves money on resources, and those resources are re-invested into the other 99.9% of users.

Edit: grammatical error

Marketing wise, it's better for the business to market with "unlimited" than creating a limit, even if it won't affect 90% of the users. For users, it creates a different feeling of freedom, even if you never use that freedom.

If you still want to play that game then restrict the service in other ways. You could for example throttle user upload to 10mbit/s if they have uploaded more than 500GB per month. That way no single user can practically upload more than 3.5TB per month. The 2 petabyte abuse scenario would have been avoided while still being able to brag about some users storing 50TB of data on your platform.

A side note on this:

I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data).

In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges. As such, it's not unlimited storage even in theory. I know this is the point of such approaches, but I'm curious why there aren't more lawsuits to this effect.

Similarly when you get e.g. 10GB of data on cellular networks and are charged for each subsequent block, there's really no way to use your 10GB. You either have to stop just before you hit the limit, leaving some data on the table or you have to go over and pay for another block. Ideally the networks should use up all the data and then ask you if you want to purchase another block. Otherwise there's no way you can actually use exactly what you ostensibly pay for.

I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest.

I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you are throttled (significantly). That works out fine to use the complete limit. On the other hand if you do want to use 15G, it's easier to do, when the block gets charged automatically.

I think it would be very hard to have a lawsuit about this if the contract includes these details.

You're still calling it unlimited while placing a limit. You've been clever about how you impose the limit, but it's still there.

Unlimited storage means just that. They never said infinite inbound data transfer speeds. "If you can get it to us, we'll store it" is totally reasonable.

>"If you can get it to us, we'll store it" is totally reasonable."

No it isn't. On the one hand you say we'll store it if you can get it to us, then on the other you build an obstruction to data getting to you. Data propagation is part of storage. I have to get bits off my processor, to your physical media to be stored, and you just built a barrier to keep that from happening. You don't get to use "unlimited" for marketing attractiveness, then bait-and-switch.

So maybe to you it sounds reasonable, but to anyone that values being up front about the service they are offering, that's nothing more than selling a product you can't deliver, i.e., deception and false advertising.

I have unlimited data transfer on my home internet connection. Is my ISP pulling a "bait and switch" because my internet bandwidth isn't also unlimited? Ignoring the whole "physically impossible" thing, of course.

The entire universe is a bait and switch using that sort of logic.

If the provider deliberately reduced speeds to ensure that you would never be able to get past a certain amount, then it's a cap. A naturally occurring limit wouldn't bother me, but that's not what we're discussing here.

Yes. Your ISP is. Because as one gentleman found out when doing terabytes worth of off hours remote backups, your ISP is more than happy to come back and bite you if you actually put those contractual terms to the test.

The fact is, every last ISP has been caught extracting higher fees from users for purportedly unlimited plans, to which the user was given the understanding they werre paying to not be throttled then hiding behind weasel worded contractual clauses to avoid culpability so as to not be held to task by having to improve their network infrastructure to handle actual traffic needs.

I'm more than versed in networking. I may not work backbone services, but I'm aware of the foundations of it, and I've gone out of my way to get familiar with the business environments and models around it.

Yes it's all statistical multiplexing. Yes. QoS is a purportedly necessary scourge to everyone in the modern day. Why? Because we allow ISP's and connectivity providers to sit back and provide lackluster links, overpromise what's being delivered, and wiggle off the hook.

My assertion is you shouldn't be able to market unlimited. All it does is create a misleading and unmeasurable relationship where no one can be held to account, and the status of the "relationship" between the customer and provider is opaque to the customer.

Yeah, I know, it just reminded me of this general thought I've had for a while (that being said, it's still limited once you throttle it so the same argument would apply.)

It’s still a finite time to upload for any given data size.

It’s not like uploads have infinite bandwidth in the absence of these limits.

There are networks that let you do that. GiffGaff in the UK is one. They're even fairly generous in giving you a couple of extra GB for free if you only go over occasionally.

Of course it's better marketing wise to market your products/offerings/capabilities as better than they actually are. Even if 90% of users don't notice the difference, it really shouldn't be surprising that some small fraction of users will notice and will be unhappy.

Actually, that's a pretty interesting solution, I wonder if that would work. Unlimited storage, but you can only upload 100GB per month. Or 1TB per year, so you can upload loads of data at once.

The ISPs have tried some 'fake unlimited' plans over the years, which got a lot of pushback. eg, unlimited data but you're capped at 2G speeds after 10GB. It's a model that totally sucks for normal users who happen to hit the limit, but could work better in a storage context: full speed instant access to a 100TB archive blob isn't quite as much a day-to-day personal essential as basic mobile data. And if you DO need fast access, there should be a path to pay for it.

I don't think it's quite the same - ISPs trade specifically in the amount of data uploaded/downloaded, so when they say you get "unlimited data per month" but in reality that's capped at 100GB, then yeah, that's misleading advertising. This is more akin a storage facility that says "we'll store unlimited number of your items, but you can only give us 1 tonne a month". But you know, if you keep supplying them a tonne a month for 10 years, then yeah, they will keep your 120 tonnes of stuff.

"How do you handle such users at MediaFire?"

You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away.

I learned this a long time ago (1998) while consulting for a very large and successful early web host (Simplenet). They allowed unlimited bandwidth and one of my first questions was "how do you make that work?".

They mercilessly throttled the top 1-2% of users until they just went away. Easy.

That very well illustrated to me what happens when interests are not aligned. The provider is going to actively work against you - as opposed to actively enable you.

> You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away.

Carbonite is an online backup provider that got caught doing this by the U.K. government in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonite,_Inc.#Misleading_adv...

It appears MediaFire is no longer unlimited

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