Online services I pay for

I only pay for Netflix right now because the Plus offering for Hulu just isn't there yet. A ton of the content isn't available on mobile and the buffering can be terrible at times. Also they claim to keep full series of shows for Plus members, but when I tried it out I couldn't find historical seasons for many popular shows that I had wanted to watch and start from the beginning. So that pretty much killed it for me.

Not only that, but most of the good/popular shows are "web only." So even though you're paying them good money to have the ability to watch on your TV or mobile device, tough luck.

Even at double the price, Netflix would be a ridiculously good deal. My only complaint with them is that they churn through their selection so damn fast. How about they just KEEP South Park and everything else? There's nothing worse than logging in on a lazy Sunday afternoon to find that 20% of your queued content has just vanished, because they only had licenses to stream the content until 5/20/2011.

$8 per month is not bad to fill the gaps in Netflix or Amazon Prime.

I could check if my servers are up every hour without subscribing to pingdom. Do I want to do it though? no. It's too painful and time consuming. For most people, it really doesn't matter if their desktop is up or down, their livelihood doesn't depend on it.

Another reason is payments. Credit cards are a lot less common here and the culture regarding them is quite different from what you see in the US. A lot of the American-centric services require credit cards which means they are simply not an option for many Europeans. That being said, alternative payment options are becoming increasingly mainstream (e.g. iDEAL[0]).

Another big factor is culture and generational differences. For example, a lot of kids here buy stuff through their phones, using paid text messages (e.g. ringtones and games). You have to be careful when using your immediate social environment as a benchmark. I assume that in the US online service consumption is quite different in rural Indiana compared to the situation in California, for example. We're both Dutch and it is part of our culture and Calvinist heritage to not want to seem wasteful by spending money on frivolous crap.

People only want to spend money on something that gives them some kind of tangible benefit (including entertainment). This explains why online shopping is already huge in Europe, because it is the most straight forward deal in terms that non-technical people understand very well: you pay for physical goods. As I mentioned before, our (legal) online media consumption is hindered by a myriad of licensing issues[1]. This explains why normal people don't subscribe to the likes of Hulu here. But the younger generations do tend to spend money on gaming subscriptions and perks (e.g. paid items). Regular people mostly spend money on entertainment, so that is why your relations aren't paying for things like Github. Their employers, or schools, however, are. Services targeting professional users are doing quite well here.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL [1]: And, possibly, by the fact that downloading content "illegal" isn't necessarily illegal in many EU jurisdictions (and otherwise not really prosecuted).

So I uploaded it to amazon s3 and configured direct access to the bucket via the web (a very easy procedure though somewhat technical). It cost me less than $5 to get that file to the remaining people, with little worry about service interruption.

I sometimes wonder if they have been to generous, it's one service I would definitely pay for if it had a lower free cap.

For backup I use backblaze, and I have about 100GB backed up across 2 computers (so $10/month) which I'm ok with. That's mainly pictures, music, documents, etc. I don't backup anything that's easily replaceable.

I have use the safari books extensively, but their book viewer sucks. I wished it was a much better UI.

for day to day stuff, a web search is much more practical... and you get helpful comments on the page most of the time

any hacker worth their salt can just use rsync or something else. and you can somewhat trust your remote host with openSSH.

if you are already going to pay for storage/bandwidth? why settle for a dumb client and doubtful privacy?

dropbox i can understand on the price issue to be more appealing, but if you plan to backup private documents, this is not a good selling point. more so in recent fear mongering campaign against them.

I'm paying the lowest linode with backup and just have a cron job on all my devices (home/work PCs, android, openwrt router) sending rsync diffs there. and as an added bonus i also use that host to host my private git repositories and run mysql slave for an offsite backup for my personal projects data.

...not extremely cheap, but not extremely insecure.