Thank you for the great comment! I think our business model is different from those low-end service providers. We understand if we offer large storage / bandwidth for free, we will have a lot more users. However, the service quality will also be degraded. Free service always has a catch and comes with risks.
Remember XDrive offered free service 7 years ago, and attracted millions of users. Eventually that business model didn't work. So they dropped free service altogether, which screwed up lots of people and their user base shrinked dramatically.
Today, lots of people think storage is cheap; it is partly true because hard disk price is getting lower and lower. But most people don't pay attention to the fact that the storage used in a high-end service like DriveHQ is not just an IDE or USB drive!
In order to ensure high performance and reliability, DriveHQ uses massive NAS and RAID storage, all storage systems and network components are redundant. That is, your data is first protected by RAID in one set of NAS device; then we have another set of NAS RAID system to be identical to the first set. DriveHQ developed technologies that mirror the two sets of RAID storage in near real-time!
Considering the scale and complexity of the system, network bandwidth cost, management / network operations and support cost, 1GB storage actually costs more than $2.5, which is more expensive than USB hard disks. We have no idea why some smaller companies feel they can afford to offer a lot of free storage and bandwidth. But it is high likely that they cannot afford it; and when it happens, users are screwed up.
By offering modest amount of storage and bandwidth for users to test our service and for casual / personal use, DriveHQ can ensure to offer the best high-end service for premium users. Our approach is simple, let those smaller companies get lots of free users to burn their cash and lower their service quality; and we will focus on offering the best high-end service for high-end users.
