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They're obviously not going to be making much more money from this. 95.5% of users do not store more than a TB. From the brief snippet provided, it doesn't seem

by beaner 12y ago

They're obviously not going to be making much more money from this. 95.5% of users do not store more than a TB. From the brief snippet provided, it doesn't seem like a bait-and-switch was their intention. > the low demand combined with the growing number of suspected abusers Probably what has happened is that the ones taking highest advantage of the infinite space are also doing it against the TOS, and bitcasa has found this to be a very difficult problem to solve. For example, running some video site and hosting all the content on bitcasa is probably something lots of people try to do, which is probably against thier TOS. I bet the storage space for these users alone may even have been okay, but the bandwidth and resources needed to monitor & prevent TOS violations added up. It sounds to me like they are probably not even counting on much revenue from the 10TB plan. It's mostly there so they can claim they offered a fair chance to people needing more space who might be abusers. And instead of paying they'll just leave the platform, which maybe they're just okay with. The pricing is also along the lines of Drive/Dropbox now, so it doesn't seem particularly malevolent. Sucks it had to happen though.

joepie91_ 12y ago
> Probably what has happened is that the ones taking highest advantage of the infinite space are also doing it against the TOS The thing is that, realistically, they have no way to know. That same model that doesn't allow them to see what people use their account for, also doesn't allow them to assess how much of the usage is against TOS. At best, it's a suspected problem, and that doesn't seem like a reasonable cause for mass-deleting user data. Plus, I'm not sure I see how "usage against TOS" is a problem to begin with, if it's not adversely affecting their legal status or infrastructure (which it doesn't appear to, given their post). > For example, running some video site and hosting all the content on bitcasa is probably something lots of people try to do, which is probably against thier TOS. I can see this being a problem, but it's easily solved by eg. capping bandwidth for the account at 100mbps when you go over 1TB space used. Nobody is going to successfully run a video site of considerable size - which over 1TB of data would be - on a 100mbps connection. It would still suck for large users, but at the very least their data won't get deleted. Even if they had no intention to suck more money out of people, at best their 'solution' would be so mindnumbingly and obviously inappropriate that somebody would have had to realize it wasn't a reasonable solution.

by beaner 12y ago

joepie91_ 12y ago

> Probably what has happened is that the ones taking highest advantage of the infinite space are also doing it against the TOS The thing is that, realistically, they have no way to know. That same model that doesn't allow them to see what people use their account for, also doesn't allow them to assess how much of the usage is against TOS. At best, it's a suspected problem, and that doesn't seem like a reasonable cause for mass-deleting user data. Plus, I'm not sure I see how "usage against TOS" is a problem to begin with, if it's not adversely affecting their legal status or infrastructure (which it doesn't appear to, given their post). > For example, running some video site and hosting all the content on bitcasa is probably something lots of people try to do, which is probably against thier TOS. I can see this being a problem, but it's easily solved by eg. capping bandwidth for the account at 100mbps when you go over 1TB space used. Nobody is going to successfully run a video site of considerable size - which over 1TB of data would be - on a 100mbps connection. It would still suck for large users, but at the very least their data won't get deleted. Even if they had no intention to suck more money out of people, at best their 'solution' would be so mindnumbingly and obviously inappropriate that somebody would have had to realize it wasn't a reasonable solution.