The Unlimited Web | Hacker News Reader

The Unlimited Web

jnfr.posterous.com

4 pointsjnfr3 comments

The internet is not free or unlimited. There exists bandwith limits because the cables can't take more than that. There exists hard disk limits, because hard disks cost. Any business who is offering something unlimited is taking a risk and trying to keep up with the need of space by adding more space when customers use space.

The price of 50GB storage is not free, it does cost but only about 3 Dollars according to the first 1TB hard drive which came up from DuckDuckGo. In this 1TB hard drive you can store 50GB partitions for 20 users. If the hard drive cost's 60 dollars then it's 3 dollars per user. So to say drop box is making about 6 dollars profit from 50GB accounts though the over all profit depends on the amount of free accounts. Box.net took huge risk to steal dropbox users with the free 50GB accounts.

After it's in the amounts of tens of thousands users the 50GB free account is not really a free anymore. The space for 10k users is 500TB and cost is 30,000 dollars.

So it is not free nor unlimited. Get that idea out of your head right away.

Thanks for pointing out some places where my article may have been misunderstood. I agree with you that there is definitely overhead for box.net to be providing the 50GB free for new users and I will re-iterate my point that I definitely believe that they will eventually profit from the risk they took. The point I was trying to make was less on the price but more on the rate at which the web is expanding in the sense of space and what we set as limits and caps.

Comparing how things were less than a decade about and now (with web hosting plans, gmail's release) suggests a growing trend that the web is quickly becoming "unlimited", and this sense of "unlimited" is quickly becoming the norm. The gripe I was trying to express with the article was how some companies fail to see that by continuing to quantify the resources available to users.

I have to agree that the sense of the web being "unlimited" is becoming the norm, though the web will never be unlimited unless we break light speed and find a way to store unlimited data.

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