3 ms·

But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwid

But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwidth behind an fine-print fair-use policy, luring people into a cheap pro plan with the hopes that most of them won't take off and become viral. That was their bet, one that they're now regretting. They could've just easily put a bandwidth meter on every account and let people decide what to do if they get close to that limit. It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated. This person is just using Vimeo as they intended: hosting and serving videos. She wasn't trying to abuse the service, just using it the way they sold it to her, as a place to host videos for $200/year. Whose fault is it that they underpriced their plans as loss leaders on purpose, and the bet didn't quite pay off? If they want to up their price because they want to change their business model, you know, more power to them... but sheesh, at least give her 60-90 days to figure out next steps. Some home internet connections can't even download all those videos and reupload them within 7 days. (edit: to be clear, Gmail didn't offer unlimited disk, just a LOT of disk)

gruez 5y ago
>It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID. That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy. Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course. I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago... Edit: one of them was called GmailFS: https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS Old slashdot (remember that?) post from 2004: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---the-google-file-system https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Right. They announced with a 1GB limit. At the time, this felt unlimited. The competition was offering around 5-10MB.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).
  - to11mtm 5y ago
    Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon... MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits. And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB. but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between VHS and DVD quality of a movie. Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked great for a few years.
  - coolso 5y ago
    They also had a “gimmick” where you could literally watch your storage increase down to the billionth percentile or something like that. I seem to remember a counter at the bottom saying my free space available was “1.053746843GB” and it would be moving.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
> But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins Not exactly. They should inform her of those through the price signals they send. Which appears to be exactly what she is complaining about.

gruez 5y ago

>It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.

technobabbler 5y ago
Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID. That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy. Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course. I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago... Edit: one of them was called GmailFS: https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS Old slashdot (remember that?) post from 2004: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---the-google-file-system https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...
throwaway09223 5y ago
Right. They announced with a 1GB limit. At the time, this felt unlimited. The competition was offering around 5-10MB.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).
- to11mtm 5y ago
  Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon... MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits. And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB. but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between VHS and DVD quality of a movie. Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked great for a few years.
- coolso 5y ago
  They also had a “gimmick” where you could literally watch your storage increase down to the billionth percentile or something like that. I seem to remember a counter at the bottom saying my free space available was “1.053746843GB” and it would be moving.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

> But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins Not exactly. They should inform her of those through the price signals they send. Which appears to be exactly what she is complaining about.