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I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006. While it is true that data accumulates as time goes on, it's not as big of an issue as described

by redm 6y ago

I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006. While it is true that data accumulates as time goes on, it's not as big of an issue as described. Older data tends to be smaller, for example, photos were lower resolution. That is compounded by the fact that storage is getting cheaper. For example, the price for a 500GB drive in 2006 is the same as a 14TB drive price today. If your getting the same subscription dollars, it suddenly becomes cheaper, every year, to store legacy data. In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work.

FpUser 6y ago
>"I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006." Oh hello there. Best wishes and hope life is wonderful for you. The company that saved me big bucks on Amazon S3 fees that were absolutely insane. Yet the same company that completely ignores requests to fix disappearing files that remain in disappeared state despite re-upload.
sleavey 6y ago
> In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work. How do you handle such users at MediaFire?
- orisho 6y ago
  It appears MediaFire is no longer unlimited
- redm 6y ago
  There's nothing you can do other than move away from unlimited storage. The model, as the OP states, works well initially, however over time, "power users" emerge to want to make use of unlimited. The only choice is to remove unlimited storage as a fixed subscription fee. You may have metered billing (unlimited storage but you are charged per GB) or to do away with unlimited storage all together. Keep in mind, that change is great for the business and 99.9% of the users. The business saves money on resources, and those resources are re-invested into the other 99.9% of users. Edit: grammatical error
  - est31 6y ago
    Marketing wise, it's better for the business to market with "unlimited" than creating a limit, even if it won't affect 90% of the users. For users, it creates a different feeling of freedom, even if you never use that freedom.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      If you still want to play that game then restrict the service in other ways. You could for example throttle user upload to 10mbit/s if they have uploaded more than 500GB per month. That way no single user can practically upload more than 3.5TB per month. The 2 petabyte abuse scenario would have been avoided while still being able to brag about some users storing 50TB of data on your platform.
      - pontus 6y ago
        A side note on this: I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data). In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges. As such, it's not unlimited storage even in theory. I know this is the point of such approaches, but I'm curious why there aren't more lawsuits to this effect. Similarly when you get e.g. 10GB of data on cellular networks and are charged for each subsequent block, there's really no way to use your 10GB. You either have to stop just before you hit the limit, leaving some data on the table or you have to go over and pay for another block. Ideally the networks should use up all the data and then ask you if you want to purchase another block. Otherwise there's no way you can actually use exactly what you ostensibly pay for.
        _flux 6y ago
        I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest. I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you are throttled (significantly). That works out fine to use the complete limit. On the other hand if you do want to use 15G, it's easier to do, when the block gets charged automatically. I think it would be very hard to have a lawsuit about this if the contract includes these details.
- rsync 6y ago
  "How do you handle such users at MediaFire?" You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away. I learned this a long time ago (1998) while consulting for a very large and successful early web host (Simplenet). They allowed unlimited bandwidth and one of my first questions was "how do you make that work?". They mercilessly throttled the top 1-2% of users until they just went away. Easy. That very well illustrated to me what happens when interests are not aligned. The provider is going to actively work against you - as opposed to actively enable you.
  - brianwski 6y ago
    > You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away. Carbonite is an online backup provider that got caught doing this by the U.K. government in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonite,_Inc.#Misleading_advertising_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonite,_Inc.#Misleading_adv...
Ayesh 6y ago
Thanks for the great service MediaFire is. It outlives many file sharing services out there, the links are pretty safe to share, knowing that they will be retained for practically forever.
Certhas 6y ago
Mathematically speaking, even though there is a recurring cost, if the cost goes down over time it's entirely possible for the cost to be finite overall. Simple example: If the recurring cost halves every year, and in the first year it's X then the cost to store it forever is 2X.
- dwighttk 6y ago
  Just because it has halved every year for a decade doesn’t mean it will continue. Cf Moore’s Law
  - PedroBatista 6y ago
    That’s why he said “mathematically speaking”
oefrha 6y ago
I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.
- vmception 6y ago
  When stock brokers were charging commissions this was their model too. They would take the user profile of most of the users that gravitated to their specific sales pitch, and make a commission structure that worked for them and let that subsidize the outliers that traded different products like high volumes of sub-penny stocks. (There are some fixed costs to stock and options trading, which are now subsidized by selling data instead of charging commissions)
- bayindirh 6y ago
  I follow r/Datahoarder for best practices and methods for getting my own stuff (like HumbleBundle or purchased eBook libraries) to my own local storage but, some of them really abuse online storage providers. I cringe sometimes reading all the posts. Why on the world someone try to mirror nearly everything to somewhere like Scrat from the Ice Age?
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    It’s mainly because they can, but I also bet it’s that feeling that you’re “cheating” the system (like why people cheat in online video games)
  - lgvld 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding
    - bayindirh 6y ago
      Some people even hunt for "Unlimited for life" early adopter plans and grab them, then abuse them. One of the backup services imposed a 12TB limit. Evernote reverted their unlimited data storage pledge, Google retired unlimited data in GSuite. I cannot say all of them due to hoarders but, Evernote CEO openly said that "People tried to zip and upload their backups to our servers. We're not that big".
acdha 6y ago
That tendency to become cheaper over time is known as Kryder’s law and it’s held up well with some notable jolts like the 2014 floods in Thailand: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/11/storage-media-update.html https://blog.dshr.org/2020/11/storage-media-update.html I think you’re right on with the extremes - even outside of paid services I’ve seen that generally hold true where a small percentage of your users are responsible for most of your storage growth. Setting a generous base tier avoids a lot of micromanagement for people who are never going to be major consumers.
rsync 6y ago
"In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work." I maintain that there is a deeper problem and that is the concept of aligned interests. The provider can say all manner of nice things and we can all smile and feel good but if the economic interests don't line up no matter how trivially there is going to be an antagonistic relationship. I don't care how much tailwind we're all getting from diminishing hard drive costs - the relationship remains fundamentally broken. I want my provider to enthusiastically embrace my own goals - especially in critical areas like data backup.
radihuq 6y ago
Wow MediaFire, I remember years ago when I was 11 I absolutely loved the service. I thought it was so cool you could see how many people downloaded your files haha thanks for building MediaFire

by redm 6y ago

FpUser 6y ago

>"I launched MediaFire as an unlimited storage provider in 2006." Oh hello there. Best wishes and hope life is wonderful for you. The company that saved me big bucks on Amazon S3 fees that were absolutely insane. Yet the same company that completely ignores requests to fix disappearing files that remain in disappeared state despite re-upload.

sleavey 6y ago

> In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work. How do you handle such users at MediaFire?

orisho 6y ago
It appears MediaFire is no longer unlimited
redm 6y ago
There's nothing you can do other than move away from unlimited storage. The model, as the OP states, works well initially, however over time, "power users" emerge to want to make use of unlimited. The only choice is to remove unlimited storage as a fixed subscription fee. You may have metered billing (unlimited storage but you are charged per GB) or to do away with unlimited storage all together. Keep in mind, that change is great for the business and 99.9% of the users. The business saves money on resources, and those resources are re-invested into the other 99.9% of users. Edit: grammatical error
- est31 6y ago
  Marketing wise, it's better for the business to market with "unlimited" than creating a limit, even if it won't affect 90% of the users. For users, it creates a different feeling of freedom, even if you never use that freedom.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    If you still want to play that game then restrict the service in other ways. You could for example throttle user upload to 10mbit/s if they have uploaded more than 500GB per month. That way no single user can practically upload more than 3.5TB per month. The 2 petabyte abuse scenario would have been avoided while still being able to brag about some users storing 50TB of data on your platform.
    - pontus 6y ago
      A side note on this: I always wondered when there'll be a lawsuit to this effect (the thing that originally prompted this thought was one of the carrier networks throttling download speed after some amount of data). In the extreme case, suppose you halve the upload speed after each chunk of size x. Then the amount of time to upload n*x amount of data will be 1+2+4+8+...+2^(n-1) units of time, which obviously diverges. As such, it's not unlimited storage even in theory. I know this is the point of such approaches, but I'm curious why there aren't more lawsuits to this effect. Similarly when you get e.g. 10GB of data on cellular networks and are charged for each subsequent block, there's really no way to use your 10GB. You either have to stop just before you hit the limit, leaving some data on the table or you have to go over and pay for another block. Ideally the networks should use up all the data and then ask you if you want to purchase another block. Otherwise there's no way you can actually use exactly what you ostensibly pay for.
      - _flux 6y ago
        I think you missed that the speed limit would affect uploads after transferring 500G _per month_, not total? So in a year you would be able to store 6 terabytes. This would probably work out fine, because e.g. typical use of cloud storage is probably backups, and the first uploads are the largest. I think some networks have operated in the way you want: you get full speed to some specified limit, and after that you are throttled (significantly). That works out fine to use the complete limit. On the other hand if you do want to use 15G, it's easier to do, when the block gets charged automatically. I think it would be very hard to have a lawsuit about this if the contract includes these details.
rsync 6y ago
"How do you handle such users at MediaFire?" You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away. I learned this a long time ago (1998) while consulting for a very large and successful early web host (Simplenet). They allowed unlimited bandwidth and one of my first questions was "how do you make that work?". They mercilessly throttled the top 1-2% of users until they just went away. Easy. That very well illustrated to me what happens when interests are not aligned. The provider is going to actively work against you - as opposed to actively enable you.
- brianwski 6y ago
  > You silently and/or passive aggressively throttle the whales in such a way that they go away. Carbonite is an online backup provider that got caught doing this by the U.K. government in 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonite,_Inc.#Misleading_advertising_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonite,_Inc.#Misleading_adv...

Ayesh 6y ago

Thanks for the great service MediaFire is. It outlives many file sharing services out there, the links are pretty safe to share, knowing that they will be retained for practically forever.

Certhas 6y ago

Mathematically speaking, even though there is a recurring cost, if the cost goes down over time it's entirely possible for the cost to be finite overall. Simple example: If the recurring cost halves every year, and in the first year it's X then the cost to store it forever is 2X.

dwighttk 6y ago
Just because it has halved every year for a decade doesn’t mean it will continue. Cf Moore’s Law
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  That’s why he said “mathematically speaking”

oefrha 6y ago

I've long suspected that r/DataHoarder is why we can't have nice things, i.e. cheap online data storage that is slightly subsidized by the average user who only stores a little. Thanks for confirming from the point of view of a major storage provider.

vmception 6y ago
When stock brokers were charging commissions this was their model too. They would take the user profile of most of the users that gravitated to their specific sales pitch, and make a commission structure that worked for them and let that subsidize the outliers that traded different products like high volumes of sub-penny stocks. (There are some fixed costs to stock and options trading, which are now subsidized by selling data instead of charging commissions)
bayindirh 6y ago
I follow r/Datahoarder for best practices and methods for getting my own stuff (like HumbleBundle or purchased eBook libraries) to my own local storage but, some of them really abuse online storage providers. I cringe sometimes reading all the posts. Why on the world someone try to mirror nearly everything to somewhere like Scrat from the Ice Age?
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  It’s mainly because they can, but I also bet it’s that feeling that you’re “cheating” the system (like why people cheat in online video games)
- lgvld 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    Some people even hunt for "Unlimited for life" early adopter plans and grab them, then abuse them. One of the backup services imposed a 12TB limit. Evernote reverted their unlimited data storage pledge, Google retired unlimited data in GSuite. I cannot say all of them due to hoarders but, Evernote CEO openly said that "People tried to zip and upload their backups to our servers. We're not that big".

acdha 6y ago

That tendency to become cheaper over time is known as Kryder’s law and it’s held up well with some notable jolts like the 2014 floods in Thailand: https://blog.dshr.org/2020/11/storage-media-update.html https://blog.dshr.org/2020/11/storage-media-update.html I think you’re right on with the extremes - even outside of paid services I’ve seen that generally hold true where a small percentage of your users are responsible for most of your storage growth. Setting a generous base tier avoids a lot of micromanagement for people who are never going to be major consumers.

rsync 6y ago

"In my findings, the reason unlimited doesn't work is a small percentage of users (very small, like ~0.1%) who push it to the extreme. In other words, if your exhaust 50% of your resources to service 0.1% of your users, at a fixed subscription cost, the model doesn't work." I maintain that there is a deeper problem and that is the concept of aligned interests. The provider can say all manner of nice things and we can all smile and feel good but if the economic interests don't line up no matter how trivially there is going to be an antagonistic relationship. I don't care how much tailwind we're all getting from diminishing hard drive costs - the relationship remains fundamentally broken. I want my provider to enthusiastically embrace my own goals - especially in critical areas like data backup.

radihuq 6y ago

Wow MediaFire, I remember years ago when I was 11 I absolutely loved the service. I thought it was so cool you could see how many people downloaded your files haha thanks for building MediaFire