1 TB is more than enough for most people. I am wondering how they will stay in business. Who would pay for that second Terabyte?
Edit: they recently changed their free tier to 30 GB. That is still pretty generous. I knew they wouldn’t last giving away a free TB for everyone.
Chances are that they didn’t have anywhere near enough space to give everyone the full terabyte and they were gambling on not everyone needing all their allocated space.
I mean, it’s not hard to throw 64TB of drives into a server, set up RAID with some level of redundancy (let’s say something that gives 16TB apparent) and get it hosted in a data centre somewhere. If you’ve a thousand users all taking up no more than a few gigabytes each, you might not even fill it.
And if they bought those drives prior to the recent price hikes on all things storage, it might not even have cost them much. (I mean, the initial outlay even now wouldn’t break $10k.)
This is all catastrophically bad planning, yes, but businesses do this sort of thing all the time, even long after the start-up period where something so basic might make sense.
(And thus we see a likely reason why they’ve suddenly shrunk the free tier to a slightly more sensible value.)
They can also deduplicate files, so one file which is shared by multiple people (or even multiple people uploading the same file independently) only needs storing once.
Combine that with deduplicating file systems that will break fuels into chunks and if some of those are the same as another file, it will only get referenced, not stored twice. This then even works if two users upload the same file without sharing it. (Assuming files aren’t encrypted by the user)
Firm agree. When they do stuff like this, they are estimating demand. Even big companies aren’t expecting even a quarter of their users to use the full extent of their plans. they are estimating that a user will overestimate how much they need and buy a larger plan than necessary that way they have wiggle room without needing to find alternatives later. This practice is also why many companies start mass spamming you when your allotment gets over 60% used, they are betting that you will buy a larger plan to futureproof yourself on the platform, which also allows them to generally allow for higher base plans than needed so its usually a win/win for the storage company.
But in cases like this where the market gets shot and they have a super high influx of people who actually want to use the full extent, they need to take measures like stated where they drop the free plans allotment in favor of hoping people get pushed to the larger plan.