Cloud Storage Providers: Comparison Of Features And Prices

[Guest]

A comparison of Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and iCloud as well as an overview of each cloud storage provider’s pricing and features.

Cloud Storage Providers: Comparison Of Features And Prices : Read more

 

[Dags]

Just wanted to add that there is a remarkable cloud solution from Lacie which is called Wuala. I guess they can't include every cloud service in this article but imo it was worth including this one too. It doesn't have the best performance and response like other solutions but data are encrypted in cloud and in your hard drive. I have many cloud services but for important stuff I have Wuala drive.

 

[LordConrad]

I like Younited, it's run by F-Secure and based in Finland.

 

[S1owJam]

I would like to add that about a month ago, Microsoft adjusted the file size limit for OneDrive to 10GB per file, for any file, not just Office Docs.

 

[huilun02]

Best cloud service is your own server...

No storage limitation and subscription. Any platform you want and always in your country.

Apart from the many other things you can do with your own server...

 

[Solandri]

THEY ARE US BASED AND THEREFORE 100% NOT SECURE AND UNDER THE TYRANNY OF THE NSA!

What makes you think the NSA is the only organization out there snooping around your files and network traffic?

All of these cloud storage services store your files unencrypted. A bored employee at the storage company could browse through your files if they wanted to. I use boxcryptor to seamlessly encrypt my files before they ever reach the cloud storage server. That protects against bored employees, the NSA, Chinese government hackers, the Russian mob, etc.

Best cloud service is your own server...

No storage limitation and subscription. Any platform you want and always in your country.

Apart from the many other things you can do with your own server...

That's fine in theory, but the reality is that most people's home Internet is asymmetrical with much slower upload speeds than download. Once you add an encryption layer and cloud service layer, file transfer speeds can become frustratingly slow. e.g. I couldn't get a movie to stream reliably with my server sitting on a 35/15 Mbps FIOS connection.

And the way most people use cloud storage, the whole point is backup redundancy. A storage company takes care of that with your files stored on a RAID (or RAID-like) drive array, backed up off-site on a regular schedule (usually every night, sometimes hourly). The vast majority of people I know can't even make themselves do a monthly backup of their files to an external HDD like I recommend to them.

If you have the time, equipment, and discipline to do all those things yourself and your Internet upload speed is really fast, then a home server is a great way to do "cloud" storage. But for the vast majority of people, having a company take care of all that for you is a better solution. What's the point of backing up your irreplaceable photos on your personal "cloud" server if it's in the same room as your computer and camera when your house burns down? For most people it makes more sense to use a cloud storage company, just make sure to encrypt your files before you hand them over.

 

[SeathP]

Microsoft OneDrive premium or Office 365 Subscription is 1 TB NOT 200 GB.

 

[junkeymonkey]

where are these servers at ?? china? India ? Pakistan? who knows .. security ?/--who knows looking at resent cloud breaches not to well it seems

 

[alidan]

@Solandri true, anyone could sneak in, but the nsa has a gun to you when it asks for a backdoor, a back door that any hacker could find and makes the service less secure... i dont use cloud for anything that i'm not giving to people anyway so it doesn't matter to me, i just use them as a file distributer... and in that case, mega is the best for me.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Typo and possible ambiguity:
Table on page 1, for OneDrive: "Yes, Built into Office/Windoews 8.x"
Should be "Yes. Also built into Office/Windows 8.x" because I can have full syncing to my Android phone as well, not just my PCs.

 

[markbanang]

If you have a decent NAS and home net connection, you can't go far wrong making your own cloud service with ownCloud.

There are Windows, MacOS and Linux desktop clients along with Android and iOS mobile clients. Since data is only stored on your server and clients, there are no storage or bandwidth restrictions other than the disks on your server and the normal restrictions of your ISP. All connections are end-to-end encrypted, so you data is never stored on a computer you don't control, and the the software is Open source (AGPL), so it can be evaluated and audited by security experts. According to the ownCloud website, there is even a VM appliance to make it easy to evaluate the server.

 

[Barantos1]

Waiting for Blackberry Cloud just because of the Security aspects brought up earlier I was also concerned about.

 

[The_Icon]

Microsoft is winning here by a long shot. Come on google, offer unlimited cloud space.

 

[phate]

No mention of SpiderOak? For the security minded, completely encrypted, and decent price. Just don't forget your password as everything is encrypted clientside before being stored.

 

[jd12]

You are not addressing reliability. Google Drive was unusable in my experience, regularly timing out when doing uploads of large files (100 MB+).

 

[mikeebb]

Onedrive does work in Win7. The local client integrates with Explorer - shows up as a Favorites item. Easily syncs between devices simply by copying files in Windows (not Internet) Explorer. As with any "cloud" service, I use it only for casual sharing, not true backup - keeping amount of content small, using it only when needed (phone sync via USB to a local computer is faster and safer), and keeping actual content in local storage.