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Users Protest Amazon Ending its Unlimited Cloud Storage Plan

Amazon’s $60 unlimited plan for Cloud Drive was one of the better deals for cloud storage (unless you managed to get it when it was $5).

Now that plan is going away.

Starting today, Amazon has replaced the unlimited plan with a flat 1TB plan for $60 a year. Existing customers on the unlimited plan will get to keep the plan through its expiration date, but once the clock runs out they will have to either switch to the new plan (and pay an extra $60 for each additional 1TB) or find a new place to store their content.

Note: Prime members will continue to get unlimited photo storage and 5GB free, and Amazon also offers a 100GB for $12 a year.

Amazon won’t delete data when the existing unlimited plans run out, but they also won’t let a user upload anything new until the user gets the situation squared away.

While this might seem like a relatively minor change with a reasonable allowance for responding to the problem,

One left a comment on TechCrunch to the effect that he feels h threw away $60. "I have several TBs that I need to upload. My up speeds are severely limited and it will take me a good 6 months to get them all uploaded. Why on earth would any sane person continue to upload knowing that it will be wasted effort 6 months after completion? " he wrote. "What about those with slow download speeds you going to delete their data before they can even have a chance to retrieve it??"

Another added: "Wow. Ok, I just wasted a huge amount of my time uploading all those files. What do you folks recommend? Google Drive, Onedrive or Dropbox? Won’t be continuing with Amazon Drive."

I do not use cloud storage much but I can appreciate how they feel.

Online storage has gotten cheap fast, but upload and download speeds have not improved at the same rate. Thanks to ISPs effectively having duopolies (at best) in many parts of the US, it can literally take months to upload a single TB of data.

So there’s a good reason why these users are upset; it would literally be faster for them to ship their data on a physical drive than to upload the data to a new cloud storage provider.

That makes for a frustrating experience when shifting providers.

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Comments


Michael June 9, 2017 um 12:04 am

Much better than what Bitcasa did, where they gave people very little warning and not much time to move files elsewhere. Six months for a grace period is pretty decent, although for some that still might not be long enough.

Time to start hiding all my files inside pictures so I can take advantage of unlimited photo storage ;-P


carls June 10, 2017 um 10:29 am

Another option is to vote ! I’m in France where popular vote got IFTTH (internet fibre to the home) in almost all the big cities and now going out to the towns and villages. Comcast and Verizon won’t and actually can’t for their shareholders. This really is a social issue at the government level. Our talent pool is drying up.


darkangel June 17, 2017 um 4:57 pm

Moving to Hubic (https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=LCUAXF) – 10TB of Cloud Storage for just $55/year!


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