Venyu Blog

It is finally happening and I can’t be more thrilled. The notion that cloud storage is cheap and free might be coming to an end. Mozy announced today that it will be raising its fees and ending unlimited storage for its consumer-based backup solution. Adam Couture of Gartner Research says that other cloud storage providers are likely to follow suit.

The truth about cloud storage is quite elementary: it is still disk in a datacenter connected to bandwidth and maintained by people. There are costs associated with doing that. A mantra that floats around these four walls at Venyu (some would say too often) is, “Unlimited is not a sustainable business model!”

Consumers have the ability to skip on down to the local electronics store and buy a 1TB USB hardrive for less than $100. Enter dreaded marketplace confusion. Consumers (both business and civilian) equate super-inexpensive USB storage with cloud storage – cloud providers can buy their disk in bulk so it must be even cheaper right?! Wrong. At Venyu, we run enterprise storage… the best actually, so that our clients know their data is available when they need it most – and it’s not close to free. In fact (I hesitate to mention it), we pay over $1/GB… plus power, bandwidth, maintenance and people.

So, are we one of those cloud backup providers raising fees and ending product lines – not by a long shot. Our fees are stable and competitive especially since our client’s data is backed up & replicated on enterprise class storage, supported & maintained by US-based engineers 24×7 all in our own commercial datacenters. We do things right and that’s not free.