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Cloud Storage Unlimited – Is It Possible?

A number of companies boast cloud storage unlimited to customers only for boosting promotions and come up in the list of cloud storage solutions. OneDrive dropped its unlimited plan recently within one year after launching the plan because they were not able to sustain it for long providing storage for an unlimited amount of data,

Unlimited practically is not a possible thing. Let us take an example- You win a lottery prize of $200 a month for life but in real condition there is a cap on how long the person’s life is. It is a marketing ploy which still provides a great benefit but it is understood that there is a limit for the unlimited things.

Cloud Software

Providing cloud storage unlimited is not possible?

Providing cloud storage unlimited to a huge number of customers is not possible on a technical level. Every cloud storage company pays for every gigabyte which means costs go up as people consume the storage space. The main hope behind providing unlimited cloud storage solutions by the companies is that the low volume users are profitable enough to subsidize the big users.

High volume users can make it unsustainable

Bitcasa, a cloud storage provider attempted cloud storage unlimited for the users several years ago. They assumed that the low volume users will subsidize the high volume users. Instead of this, a large number of high volume users signed up immediately and the sustainability of service went down due to this. Due to this Bitcasa raised the unlimited cloud storage plan rate from $99 to $999 per year before they discontinued the unlimited plan altogether.

Excuse

The cloud storage solutions providers do not take the full blame on themselves. They point the finger on the heaviest users on making the service unsustainable. Microsoft reported some users who exceeded 75TB of storage level which is 14000 times the storage taken by an average user. Bitcasa gave the reason as the growing number of suspected abusers and also the weak demand for unlimited cloud storage plan.

But in real terms, cloud storage solutions means truly unlimited and any attempt to discourage this kind of use seems like betrayal. There seems to be a lot of mess among storage providers in weeding out legitimate users from the users who make a violation of use. If someone is using the unlimited storage plan for backing business servers or streaming video service, the provider can shut it down but it may involve looking at the actual files and it would be a breach of privacy which is not at all possible.

But despite this bleak outlook the cloud storage unlimited model is not truly impossible and there is a hope. Some online backup services like Carbonite and BackBlaze have been doing it for years in a smarter way.

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