Your buffet comparison by the way isn't a good one. They're not putting themselves out there as someone with a 1TB, 2TB, 10TB or even "enough for 99.9% of people!", they're saying that they're giving storage with zero limits. She's amassed ~10TB of photos over that time and currently stores them on piles of HDDs and a few spindles of DVDs scattered around her house.Īnd yes, I absolutely accept that I'm an outlier but any service that offers an unlimited plan is explicitly advertising itself to outliers. This consumes ~1TB per hour and I tend to store it for archival purposes since it only costs ~$25 to do so for pretty much ever.įor a less extreme case, one of my old school teachers has been doing photography as a hobby for ~15 years. I own a Panasonic GH5 and record on an Atomos Ninja Inferno, which outputs 4K 10-bit ProRes video at 60fps. Assuming I shoot one day every weekend, that's 3TB of data a year (that's actually a close estimate when I account for vacations and such too). Every photo is ~85MB and I can shoot 700 photos in a day. I do a lot of photography/videography in my spare time (not professional, have never been paid for it). Would you really want a judge to decide that, or would you prefer a hard limit to be placed on the website and the contract in the first place? I truly don't understand the appeal of "unlimited" plans compared to simple hard limited, tiered plans. Or, if the contract says they have the right to terminate my service if they deem the amount to be too much, that would make nervous even as a normal user of the service, since the definition of "ridiculous" might be decided by some judge in a court if the service decides to cancel the contract and my company decides to sue. But in the back of my mind I'm nervous that they will shut off my service, despite the contract I entered with them to keep an "unlimited" amount of data for the price I paid. Amazon, Backblaze, and Dreamhost are literally giving off these vibes! Regardless, I'm on a budget so I purchase Backblaze and upload my 17TB. To me, the $100 services seem like scams or that they have no idea what they're doing. During my shopping, I discover ten $1000/yr services for 20TB storage and three $100/yr services for unlimited storage.
Suppose I have a legitimate use case for storing 17TB of data and need to do it on a budget. People who use a ridiculous amount can no longer be sure whether their service will be active the next day because an employee deems their use "ridiculous".Īnd I don't think they're at fault like you're suggesting. People who use less than a ridiculous amount are paying for a few outliers using 100x more.
This is why I hate services that offer "unlimited" of some resource, like Dreamhost and AWS, so I will never use them.