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Anyone know how 'free' storage providers make any money? This is basically 10G + backup + geographical replication. IT costs (hard disks), electricity,cooling, bandwidth all add up.

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We are deployed on Amazon EC2 + S3 so the backup infrastructure cost is saved. In terms of profit, it definitely works out depending on how you go about doing it :)

We will add options to earn more free storage soon, but I would love to see some stats behind other similar services if they are available!

I swear I saw an interview with imgur's Alan Schaaf about how it made money, or broke even. So far I've only found this 10/2010 interview in which he only says "it's been really hard to make a profit"

http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/02/10/alan-schaaf-interview-im...

In the 10/2010 interview, Schaff said imgur served 471 million images totalling about 65 terabytes. It had just started pro accounts at that point.

Thanks for the link and yes imgur is definitely a great success story. I'm sure it is doing well these days :)

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