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Goodbye Amazon Cloud (for us--it's not going away)

When Amazon Cloud first came out, I was happy to sign up for $60 a year for unlimited storage.

I knew there had been many unlimited cloud offers that later became limited (I'm looking at you Microsoft! among others), but I thought if anyone would keep their commitment it would be Amazon. After all, with AWS and their other services, they are as much a cloud services company as they are a retailer.  And they offer a lot of add-on benefits to Prime members like us.  I thought they stood the best chance of being truly unlimited. Or, if they did one day limit storage,to do so at a higher value than Microsoft or others.  That is, more than a terabyte.

My primary responsibility as the Director of Family IT in my opinion is to make sure there is effective backup for our various computers.  Amazon Cloud would play nicely for that.

I purchased licenses of ARQBackup and had it setup so my laptop and my wife's backed up to Amazon.  It worked wonderfully. I was even able to log into Cloud while my wife was out of the country for four months to make sure her system was still backing up.

Alas, Amazon  reneged on their unlimited offer.  They have instead setup multiple tiers.  For the $60 you used to pay for unlimited for a year, you now only get a terabyte.  And each additional terabytabout e is a full $60 annually.  It isn't a bad deal compared to the competitors.  Google is $120 a year for a terabyte, Dropbox is about $100.




My contention remains : as a service to Prime members, and considering their awesome Cloud presence, I expect better from Amazon.

And why 100% for each incremental step?  That first terabyte has customer acquisition, advertising, overhead, and retention costs in it. Why not add additional terabytes for less than the full $60?  

I think they missed a chance to soften the blow. They should have made it five terabytes for $60 a year.  In one year of Cloud service, I've paid for a physical drive (I'm assuming they pay a lot less per gigabyte of hardware drive than their charge consumers for consumer drives.   Year 2 I've likely paid for the bandwidth and overhead costs.

So why not just buy a 5 gigabyte drive of my own?  Responsible backing up requires off site backups.  That's the service I'm buying from Amazon.

So now I've switched so each machine backing up to One Drive. We get a terabyte of One Drive with our Office 365 subscriptions for five people; essentially, five terabytes for $99 a year.  It's a great deal!  But I could see us dropping Office at some point in the future; Google Docs is good enough.  

It would be great if Amazon met our needs for storage as we once hoped they would.






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