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Why would I pay Google for extra storage?

By | August 10, 2007, 5:56am PDT

Summary: Google outlined plans to allow its customers to buy more storage if they run past their caps from posting photos or hoarding email. But why pay Google for storage when it’s basically free elsewhere? We’ve been continually told that storage costs are going down and Google rivals like Yahoo already do the “unlimited storage” dance. Yet here [...]

Google outlined plans to allow its customers to buy more storage if they run past their caps from posting photos or hoarding email. But why pay Google for storage when it’s basically free elsewhere?

We’ve been continually told that storage costs are going down and Google rivals like Yahoo already do the “unlimited storage” dance.

Yet here comes Google doing us a favor. From the Official Google Blog:

“The Picasa team is pleased to tell you that in a few hours we’ll be rolling out extra storage that you can purchase to use across several Google products (today, Picasa Web Albums and Gmail; soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets). That will help make storage really useful, like letting you upload lots of full resolution images to Picasa Web Albums. When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB. If only testing everything were this easy.”

Gee thanks. Then I get this as a page:

googstorage.png

While this plan may be just peachy for hard core Google folks, those of us that use Gmail as a secondary account are left scratching our collective heads–especially if you use Yahoo.

At Yahoo I’m greeted with unlimited storage.

googstorage1.png

Flickr does have a pro account though for $24.95 a year. The free account gives you a bandwidth allowance of 100MB a month.

But the pro account at Flickr gives you unlimited storage.

Add this up and the Google pay for storage plan sounds like a rip-off to me–especially since Google is portraying this storage move as a great customer benefit.

Update: The more I chat about this Google storage strategy with folks the more confusing the move gets. I just can’t figure out the benefit here–it’ll be obvious if millions of people pay for storage.

But this move by Google totally bucks the recent trends. Google’s move could mean:

  • Storage isn’t as cheap as we were led to believe. Perhaps storage costs are going up.
  • Google is looking to squeeze more revenue due to a potential search slowdown (no evidence of this yet).

Other than that I just don’t see the logic behind the move. As a customer I really don’t see the value. For $500 I could forgo the Google storage and buy one of those snazzy Seagate drives. At that price I could also explore a service like Amazon’s S3. The benefit to both the Amazon and Seagate solutions: I wouldn’t be dependent on Google.

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Topics

Google Inc., Storage, Google Picasa, Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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RE: Why would I pay Google for extra storage?
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0 Votes
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It is an added benefit
JT82 10th Aug 2007
Only if you use Google services (GMail) as your primary account and conduct a lot of "business" with them. Sounds pretty fair actually, long as the backups go right.
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RE: Why would I pay Google for extra storage?
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0 Votes
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Torn Between Y! and Google
RobzyC 10th Aug 2007
I am really finding myself torn between the two, I have Yahoo! on one side, offering unlimited storage and a suit of tools and Google on the other, wanting money for extra storage, but a suite of better apps (IMO)...

Im sticking with both at the moment, I use Yahoo Mail a lot, and have done for years, so I get a LOT of mail to that address, so I can use the storage (I actually use it for file transfers as well, just emaling to myself purely because I now have the space). But I really like Googles Calender / Reader / Notepad and theres still more things I haven't looked at. Its not difficult to use both so why not?
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Strange Stratedgy
mljameson 10th Aug 2007
I am not sure why Google is going this route, it seems to go against the current trend. No doubt the "Google can do no wrong" crowd will try and justify this with spin, but reality is paid storage has no mass appeal. There are even rumors that Flickr storage will change for the better once Yahoo! Photos users have been migrated and that site is closed down.

Yahoo! must be loving this.
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What, not possible to get a second account
Boot_Agnostic 10th Aug 2007
and use the free storage as 'extra'. Don't know, I don't use these services. Just asking.
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Second accounts: yes
big red one 13th Aug 2007
I have two Gmail accounts, of course there's no way to connect them together. As long as you have other email addresses to use as signups for Gmail, I don't know how many you could have. And each Gmail account offers you a Picasa account.
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Welcome to the cloud. Tickets please.
RustyShackleford 10th Aug 2007
Ahh. Computing the in the clouds. Where collaboration and remote access are the promises used to drive us to a better world full of Google rainbows and lollipops.
0 Votes
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LOL!
John Zern 10th Aug 2007
[i[a better world full of Google rainbows and lollipops
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Wires to Trip Over
swhiser 10th Aug 2007
Larry-

You're not everyone.

The value of paid remote storage is to avoid the tangles and extra STUFF of managing one's own. Most users don't have any interest in doing that.

Frankly, my stuff is safer -- on several levels & definitions of safety -- being kept somewhere in a Google data center where it is unlikely to be

a) spilled on (coffee)
b) stolen by a cat-burglar
c) deleted in a latenite inspired new episode of "The Accidental Sysadmin
d) broken
e) backed up incorrectly

etc...

Trust users to find the value where they may.
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So dont buy it if you dont want to pay.
Been_Done_Before 10th Aug 2007
They are offering it for the layman who likes to have one login and have all of his stuff in one place.

I can tell you places to get cheaper parts, but he layman wants to go to the store and get what he wants. He wants the convienience... and that is what you are paying for.

I personally think 500 for 250 gigs is expensive for idividuals, but for small companies, thats not a bad price to pay for off site backups.

I Currently just burn my stuff to dual layer dvds, i hope to start using the blue ray burners in the next 2 years.

Storage IS getting cheaper, Bandwidth is getting cheaper, but backup has yet to move that way.
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nobody ever said you have to buy everything from google
ericsami 10th Aug 2007
I am telling you sooner or later wall street's push is gone make google fall out of favor with young peeps.

as bill gates famously said I have heard google can make robots that can make hamburgers. He was quite correct, a company like google who has had good success in one specific area is often trusted for no reason to have success in arbitary field.

One has to keep in mind that original team succeeds in a field that launches the company in success because they truely thought why their product useful.

whether it is the search team in google or yahoo autos or perhaps guys in the windows team or developer in oracle working on database engine.

a success in on area most of the times is unlikely to translate to a big success in other big areas.

through all this google worshiping on the internet what has suprized me is how many developers think google is this and that.

Ok they have good search and you know folks who came up with the search had thought about for many years they had a passion for it. It doesn't mean that tommrow google would have success writing blue ray dvd codecs that would compete with HD DVD.

It was the same case with microsoft. Microsoft was awesome in creating platform software like windows,office SQL SERVER, EXCHANGE but yet it has taken them really ten years to get msn to an acceptable level.

It is really not that easy for a matured company to get into other areas.
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The race is on.
WinnebagoBoy 11th Aug 2007
Larry said:
"* Storage isn?t as cheap as we were led to believe. Perhaps storage costs are going up.
* Google is looking to squeeze more revenue due to a potential search slowdown (no evidence of this yet).

Other than that I just don?t see the logic behind the move."

Larry, its a targeted move at business. What do you think all those Microsoft employees they are hiring are doing?

I did a gut check on this move trying to answer Larry's question for myself. If you ignore the direct free competition like Yahoo and others (Yahoo does charge for non mail Storage I believe) and look at two traditional markets, the server farm web hosting services and just buying a hard drive for your needs, for 2.5 megs of storage with my webhost, its $17/month, but you are paying for the hosting and domain management servers, not just space. And Pricewatch (http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_drives/) sells a 500 Gigabyte SATA drive for $95. Google is driving toward something in between I believe.

To use said service you have to have to subsidize their service with a very large pipe to access the data at a reasonable speed, otherwise it is much more efficient to do it yourself. The downside to your own server is maintenance and backup, i.e., your time.

Thus I see two large markets popping up: home servers and web hosting server farms offering competition.

The race is on.
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Because, Google is...
bjbrock 11th Aug 2007
spatial...I mean special.
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Picasa is the key
Michael Of Atlanta 13th Aug 2007
Google has been quietly adding features to Picasa, and it's integration to the web version is very easy. Also, you can store (and share) photographs up to 10mb. It takes a while to use up 1gb 10mb at a time. By then, I think Google will raise the bar, as they done historically.

Oh, and Picasa works with Linux. My daughter is going nuts with it on her Ubuntu notebook.
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Pay for storage on Google
dubrosky 13th Aug 2007
You posed the question, "why pay for storage when it is free elsewhwere". Then you mentioned other sites but you have to pay for those. Where is all this bigger free online storage your talking about? Google is accessible.

Or is it your secret? Oops, your paying for it, thought so, that is OK, we all make mistakes. Well, you do anyway. :+)
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Gmail beats the pants off Yahoo mail
julesagogo 13th Aug 2007
Unless yahoo allows tagging and keeping e-mails in conversations.
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Maybe so, but
notsofast 13th Aug 2007
at least my private email account on Yahoo doesn't get spam. My gmail account, which I've never used gets spam. I only look whenever i have a need to log into google for something else, but there's always spam there.

Of course I might change my mind if I used these free accounts for something other than personal email.
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No spam on Yahoo? Come on!
Michael Of Atlanta 13th Aug 2007
I don't know how long you've had a Yahoo! email account, but I get a ton of spam on my 2 Yahoo! accounts. I also get spam on Google, but they have an exceptional spam filter. Only occasionally does a spam message make it to my inbox.

I've used all the major free email services and nothing holds a candle to Google.

The only annoyance is the context sensitive ads on the margin, but, often as not, they are good for a laugh.
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Google can use a few more bucks, like me
dubrosky 13th Aug 2007
For more than doubling your accessible online space to 6GB for 1.66 a month, is less than the competition you mentioned. If only a million subscribers sign up for the additional storage space, the is 20 million in their pockets and pays for the new storage area networks they just brought online. Besides, users of Picasa are now needing more space, and the mobile Google suite is starting to work for them. And users are asking for more space! Giving what the customer needs and asks for. Do a survey and prove it!
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Yahoo Unlimited is Limited
dubrosky 13th Aug 2007
If you start storing photos, etc on your Yahoo account, Yahoo will cut you off. They call that storage abuse and where do they find the abusers, those using over 3GB of space. Account is frozen then, so, there is no unlimited storage with Yahoo. I am waiting for them to unlock my account so I can get to my photos, etc of just under 4GB. I am a Storage Abuser according to Yahoo.
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GMAIL gives Free POP3
bill@... 13th Aug 2007
none of the others do - that in of itself makes it the choice - I have sent repeated emails to Yahoo and MSN asking them when they will offer that and for the last year, all they say, you can have it if you pay for it.

Anything I want to keep long term, I will keep on my files, I use the net for sharing -

So Googles space is quite enough
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Google storage
Mike106132000@... 13th Aug 2007
Email storage isn't a problem - just go and delete all the crap. 2.5 Gb should be enough for most people. When the Google server went wrong I got all my sent email downloaded by Outlook Express! lol. I haven't used Picasa - I just downloaded it. I have a nasty feeling it is going to index my hard drive. When Microsoft, Google, Roxio and HP are all indexing stuff at the same time - my PC slows to a crawl. I think I'll stick with Photobucket for storing pictures and organise my own pics on my HDD. I had Media player organise my music once - I could find anything after.

http://www.Mike10613.Talktalk.net
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Picasa does both
Michael Of Atlanta 13th Aug 2007
There is a local version for all of your photos, and an online version for those you want to share. You can tell Picasa where to look for new photos, and as you add them, you will see a little tab on the left indicating Picasa is being updated. Picasa also lets you import photos from a card, folder, or even directly from the camera. Picasa even does a decent job of correcting problems with photos. Nothing close to what I can do with PSP, but good enough for most folks, I would imagine.

What's intriquing to me is how quietly Google has been integrating all these functions.
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Picasa indexing
big red one 13th Aug 2007
I use Picasa and, like most s/w, you just don't let it default to searching your HD. I'm a photographer, and I use Picasa for posting personal stuff for friends and family to view, so I have a LOT of photos on my hard drive and I simply tell Picasa which folder I want it to scan when I want to upload some photos to a new gallery.

I also preshrink the photos in Photoshop so they are already web size, because I don't want anyone downloading print versions. That way, it will take a looooong time to use up my 1GB of Picasa storage. (each web-sized jpg is only about 100k)
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More on Picasa
Michael Of Atlanta 13th Aug 2007
I'm not a pro, so I'm not concerned about somebody downloading the originals. In fact, one thing I like about Picasa is that I can upload the photos as their original size and friends and family can purchase or print photos if they want. I used to use Shutterfly for sharing, but once uploaded, you can't download the original size.

I cull through them to find the ones I want to share, but, even with that, I hope that Google bumps the capacity before too long. I'm betting they do.
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Is it only storage....?
nbjayme 13th Aug 2007
"For $500 I could forgo the Google storage and buy one of those snazzy Seagate drives. At that price I could also explore a service like Amazon?s S3. The benefit to both the Amazon and Seagate solutions: I wouldn?t be dependent on Google."

How fast are they at delivering your photos? How scaleable is it?

Amazon S3
Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer "in" and "out" refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests


Moreover, I don't happen to see Google limiting your transfer rate.

So, don't simply look at the storage issue. Take other matters into account also.
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Amazon Jungle Disk is still a little wobbly
Michael Of Atlanta 13th Aug 2007
I have been in the process of testing Amazon S3 for our company's data backup. I have my master collection of iTunes at work and my master collection of photos at home. Work connects to the Internet via a T1, home, a residential grade DSL. I have found it very tricky to transfer files back and forth. Everything has to be just so.

To say that Google was easier to use is a tremendous understatement. That being said, what Amazon is setting out to do is more ambitious.

Your mileage may differ.
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Not for Mail - but for Picasa ? Yes
gavin.bollard@... 13th Aug 2007
On the face of it, this seems silly but as people get larger megapixel cameras, they'll consume a lot more disk space in Picasa. If only Google would provide a proper file storage/sharing mechanism... (GoogleBase is very restricted in acceptable file types).

If people need to share lots of data, are running out of space at home or have unstable configurations (ie: lose data a lot), there is good sense in hosting with Google. I think they'd pay more for guaranteed data recovery though.

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