Dropbox announces partnership with Google Cloud

[HEXUS]

Create, open, edit, save, and share Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides directly from Dropbox.

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[aniilv]

Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper? I just don't feel like forking 7£ every month for some basic offsite storage with sync. And the plans of only 1TB or nothing is terrible. Halve that and I'd be up for it.

[LSG501]

Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper?

Loss leaders in all likelihood.

Get people on your service and then basically try and 'lock them in' by making it hard to leave or make it so they don't want to leave due to having 'everything there' and then keep the prices the same or increase etc.

[peterb]

Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper? I just don't feel like forking 7£ every month for some basic offsite storage with sync. And the plans of only 1TB or nothing is terrible. Halve that and I'd be up for it.

Because the operating costs of the facility are considerably greater than the cost of the storage devices.

[Syphadeus]

Because the operating costs of the facility are considerably greater than the cost of the storage devices.

Okay, but at what point did a breakeven or law of diminishing returns come in to play?

I ask the same question as aniilv only because if you look at the past few years, Google Drive pricing and capacity has stagnated. On the one hand you could argue that the price hasn't gone up either but if you compare the "progress" of the product offering to how it was just a few years before that where online storage capacity was increasing and price decreasing dramatically, what is the reason behind the stagnation?

Specifically relating to data storage - as technology has progressed density has increased massively and other advances have been made as well including power consumption, reliability etc. For the storage company this means that more storage can be put into the same space and use less energy. This must, to some degree, offset increasing costs for things like power and other overheads and considerations?

Put simply I have a 100GB Google Cloud subscription which costs me, I think, £1.79 a month. The jump to the next tier is better value but overkill and you would think they'd offer something in between or have increased the 100GB to 2/300GB by now. But it's just static.

[Strawb77]

Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper? I just don't feel like forking 7£ every month for some basic offsite storage with sync. And the plans of only 1TB or nothing is terrible. Halve that and I'd be up for it.

i agree with you- i get 5gig free- or subscribe and get a terabyte- ludicrous there`s no middleground.

[kingpotnoodle]

Can someone explain why the price of such services is never coming down even though storage is always getting bigger and cheaper? I just don't feel like forking 7£ every month for some basic offsite storage with sync. And the plans of only 1TB or nothing is terrible. Halve that and I'd be up for it.

Larger hard disks are not necessarily cheaper per GB than smaller ones, also it takes years for new drives to filter through and older drives to be retired and replaced. Dropbox or their data host won't rip out and replace every single drive as soon as a bigger one is released. Engineers, facilities and bandwidth are far higher % of a cloud host's costs than the drives themselves. The host servers have probably gone up in price, RAM prices are very high at the moment.

Say you host at home instead of using a cloud host, lets see how much it costs to make your data nearly as safe as it would be on a cloud host... A 1TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drive is £48, the data is precious so you probably want to tolerate 2 drive failures before data loss occurs. A cloud host would probably replicate your data across distinct hosts in different racks, in different datacentres, all with UPS coverage. So to replicate that you need to buy 3x drives, 3x NAS, 3x UPS and have 3x places to have them plugged in and able to sync, ideally in geographically separate buildings in case of fire/flood/theft.

3x £48 for a Seagate Ironwolf 1TB
3x £86 for Synology DS115J (very cheap 1 bay NAS)
3x £79 for APC BE-400 UPS

So that's £639 on hardware. Let's assume that these setups use 10W each on average, so 30W, at £0.15 per kWH is almost £40 per year on electricity, say you use this setup for 3 years - £120. Now the total is £759 - or nearly 76 months of Dropbox Standard, over 6 years worth and I didn't even factor in the cost of the bandwidth or your time to configure/maintain it over the quick sign-up to something like Dropbox.

Sure you could have less redundancy but then it's not a fair comparison - buy a single NAS, no UPS and only 2 drives in RAID-1 but one house fire or power surge and the data is toast. Cloud hosting your data is very good value for money considering the safety of the data.

Yes, perhaps they could charge per GB or per 100GB but that makes billing a lot more complex and many people just like a simple monthly fee they can budget for without variable costs that they might not understand how to predict.

EDIT: I've just noticed Dropbox Standard is now 2TB, it used to be 1TB, so you are now getting more for your money so price per GB is falling.

[rainman]

The question you should be asking is why you'd want to entrust your data to Google/Dropbox in the first place? It could be free and many still wouldn't touch it.

[peterb]

The question you should be asking is why you'd want to entrust your data to Google/Dropbox in the first place? It could be free and many still wouldn't touch it.

I encrypt anything slightly sensitive that I store on there; not that I put anything really sensitive there anyway.