Companies like Yahoo claimed that they are offering us infinite storage (limit on website is 1 T byte). Even with such a limit, 1 T still a big quantity even with the drop of storage prices. It still costs you a fortune to have your own 1 T storage hard disk. Hence, providing this service for free is questionable. Is "sharing" the answer to this question?. Can they guarantee that every one can get this storage at any time or it is based on certain average utilization of the users of their storage allocation?
If you completely ignore peoples' privacy, this is a simple MATH question :)
Here are the steps in getting the "answer" !
*** Example: A 4TB NAS-grade Western Digital HDD costs $200
*** This is $50 per 1TB.
*** But, you have to have redundancy for availability and reliability. This redundancy and reliability will be managed with sophisticated distributed file systems, specifically designed for this kind of data, e.g., Google GFS , and BigTable
*** Assume a redundancy ratio of 3.0
*** Your cost for 1TB went up to $150
*** The question becomes: If I make a $150 investment, how much does it take for me to recoup it from TARGETED ADVERTISING
*** Assume that, this person will keep the free 1TB for 3 years. You have to recoup $50 per year
*** IF you include the datacenter operating costs, the price goes up. Ignore that for now.
*** Assuming that, each TARGETED CLICK COST is $0.05 (i.e., advertisers pay Google 5 pennies for each button they clicked from that advertisement, then, this corresponds to 50/0.05=1000 clicks per year, or, 3 clicks per day
*** But, Google also takes commission of what they sell. It could be 10%. So, they have to get you to buy one thing for $500 to break even
You get the idea ... It is not FREE ! You are SELLING YOUR PRIVACY to get 1TB space !!!
Dear Dr. Ismat Aldmour, Even if exists, what about access availability 'any time, any where'. What about confidentiality?
If you completely ignore peoples' privacy, this is a simple MATH question :)
Here are the steps in getting the "answer" !
*** Example: A 4TB NAS-grade Western Digital HDD costs $200
*** This is $50 per 1TB.
*** But, you have to have redundancy for availability and reliability. This redundancy and reliability will be managed with sophisticated distributed file systems, specifically designed for this kind of data, e.g., Google GFS , and BigTable
*** Assume a redundancy ratio of 3.0
*** Your cost for 1TB went up to $150
*** The question becomes: If I make a $150 investment, how much does it take for me to recoup it from TARGETED ADVERTISING
*** Assume that, this person will keep the free 1TB for 3 years. You have to recoup $50 per year
*** IF you include the datacenter operating costs, the price goes up. Ignore that for now.
*** Assuming that, each TARGETED CLICK COST is $0.05 (i.e., advertisers pay Google 5 pennies for each button they clicked from that advertisement, then, this corresponds to 50/0.05=1000 clicks per year, or, 3 clicks per day
*** But, Google also takes commission of what they sell. It could be 10%. So, they have to get you to buy one thing for $500 to break even
You get the idea ... It is not FREE ! You are SELLING YOUR PRIVACY to get 1TB space !!!
Actually that was a pretty impressive answer but there are a few tricks that lie somewhere else.
1. There are limitation on uploading volume, so that no one use it as storage space.
2. Most of mail space is consumed by Group mails in which server store just once and gives a pointer to every one. (In this case most of mails that are getting full don't need any space actually.)
3. Most users don't use all of their space. It's a matter of confidence rate. given the current volume, there is always a boundary of 10%(less or more) free space so that It won't ever encounter a problem.
They give users lots of confidence while actually there are not much increase in the capacity of servers.
Mentioned computations just explain economic side which is the most important.
Impressive, I can summarize suggestions so far as follows:
- Tolga: They are selling our privacy and commissioning on us.
- Mahmoud, they don't need to provide the full servers capacity
- Peter, who will upload 1 T byte?. Use of encryption and some tricks based on referencing.
-Moreover, Afaq is worried about accessibility, availability and confidentiality (I think these are guaranteed, aren't they?). Can you comment more.please.
Thank you all. I will give you my experience. I have been Yahoo user for years. I lately suffered some problems of slow down in yahoo so I decided to clear out some of the old messages. I checked to find that I only consumed 0.45% of the allocated space. Thanks. @AlDmour..
Sure There are always unseen reasons. But the only people who can clear this doubt are those who work on these(yahoo and similar) companies
Ismat, let me re-summarize your summary :)
--- Peter, who will upload 1TB ? hmm. good question. They could be depending on OVER-PROVISIONING. In other words, if 100 people sign up for 1TB, it is not necessary that, a 100TB space will be immediately needed. It could very well only be 10TB or less ! They can use the statistics on people's usage to make it sounds much better. After all, they know everything about me, including my dog's favorite type of food :)
--- Mahmoud, They don't need to provide full capacity. Hmm. this is a very important observation , in that, some people will actually switch to their PAID service to avoid the super annoying advertisements etc ... This is another revenue stream.
--- Tolga (that's me) --- . They sell our privacy and make money. Actually, I don't know what percentage of their revenue comes from that vs. switching people to the PAID service.
There used to be term : BAIT AND SWITCH, which is a very bad business practice, but, it works. I guess, the internet equivalent of it is ANNOY AND SWITCH :)
Thank you Frank. de-duplication. Good. It is a simple trick especially to handle bulk emails with attachments which is a common feature of today's communication. I think Peter has said the same thing in his comment above: "they can save space by just referencing the common item". Thanks. @AlDmour.
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