News
Amazon Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage for Almost Nothing
Amazon.com Inc. fired the latest volley in the cloud price wars this week by launching two unlimited cloud storage plans for very little cost.
The Unlimited Photos Plan costs about $.99 per month. It is meant for photos only, although an additional 5GB comes with it for videos and other data. Meanwhile, the Unlimited Everything Plan costs $4.99 per month, and has no caps on space or file types.
Both plans come with the option of a free three-month trial.
"Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don't know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up," said Josh Petersen, director of Amazon Cloud Drive, in a press release. "With the two new plans...customers don't need to worry about storage space -- they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music and files in one convenient place."
The data for both plans will be kept on Amazon Cloud Drive. Those with Amazon Prime accounts and Amazon Fire devices (tablets and phones) already have unlimited space for photos, so Amazon is hoping they'll be tempted to upgrade to the Unlimited Everything Plan.
The new plans are aimed squarely at Amazon Web Services (AWS) competitors such as Dropbox, Box, Google Inc., Microsoft and Apple Inc., who all offer similar plans of cheap, vast storage. Google Drive, for example, offers up to 15GB of storage for free, 100GB for $1.99 per month and 1TB for $9.99 per month. The latest Amazon.com pricing undercuts that plan by half, so it wouldn't be surprising to see Google update its plan with a less-expensive offering in the near future.
Microsoft, for its part, offers 15GB of space on OneDrive for free, and $6.99 per month for 1TB.
About the Author
Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.