I believe google drive also has partially unlimited photo storage, if the photos are below a certain resolution they don't count towards your storage quota.
That's true -- photos under 2000px are free, and Google will automatically resize full-size photos as they're uploaded. Personally, I just upload my entire photo library to GDrive and G+ automatically processes them into G+ Photos. Hopefully Google rolls out unlimited full-size photo storage soon, since even I'm not sure why I pay for GDrive when I already have Amazon Prime.
In an ideal world, G+ Photos will roll out with unlimited full-size storage that deletes both smaller-resolution duplicates already in G+ Photos and also deletes full-size duplicates taken from my GDrive. I don't even mind the vendor lock-in of G+, where it's fantastically difficult to download or delete your entire library. I just want a single, organized-by-date, comprehensive location for my entire library that allows me to hoard, peruse, improve, and share my photos. G+ is so damn close to that dream already...
But that would probably open them up to a lot of users using their service for online storage instead of just backups which they are trying to avoid I believe.
>Frankly I cant even begin to think why anyone would recommand Appengine to anybody.
It's awesome for tiny things where the free quota is enough.
I have about 15 small app engine web apps, most written in python/flask, that are mostly used either only by me or maybe by some of my friends. All small websites, web apps or tools with a few hundred loc each.
The datastore APIs are nice and simple if you don't need much, it's easy to deploy, no management, easy APIs for stuff like cron jobs etc. and completely free with no way to accidentally incur costs. I haven't found anything better for that.
AWS has most free tiers only for 1 year and if you accidentally go over the monthly free tier it costs you something.
With heroku (or openshift) you need to set up and manage stuff like databases, memcache and many of the useful APIs appengine provides yourself.
While I can totally see many use cases where GAE is bad, for small free web apps its really nice and by far the best thing I'm aware of.
Well Dropbox/Gdrive/Skydrive etc. all offer free storage in the range of 15-30gb, which is enough for most normal users. For professionell use there is S3,glacier, box etc. and they all offer known security and redundancy.
Most businesses won't touch anything related to bitcoin and things lacking a reliable SLA.
While a lot of people have unused storage space, many lack usable upload bandwidth and have low availability, so I would assume a lot of copies would be needed.
It's gonna be very interesting to see if stuff like this or storj, which was posted earlier today, can compete with current services.
But as someone with a lot of servers with unused space I sure hope so.
One has to wonder how much unused disk space is sitting on the generic Dell boxes in various cubicle farms, libraries, etc. Could be decent trickle revenue, and it wouldn't impede usability/performance the way mining does.
Lots of businesses are already relying on Bitcoin for revenue. The reliability -- and other properties -- of a network like Filecoin can be measured easily. Businesses are all about numbers. :)
You can find ready to go Mac OSX VMs online (torrent/usenet etc., usually 2-6gb).
They worked on any PC I tried them on, but without GPU acceleration, although I had to install a VMWare MacOS enabler (that was bundled with the VM) because VMWare disallows OSX by default I believe, might be different with Virtualbox.
I believe the free tier has higher* response times.
Also as far as I know once you get to something like 100Tb a month they will ask you or require you to upgrade. But thats still ridiculously high, the same would cost $12k on AWS.
The higher tiers have hard guarantees on response times and level of support you'll get.
In my experience customers do a great job of self-segregating. If you offer "enterprise" as a tier, enterprises will generally pick it, even if the listed benefits are the same as another package. In exchange, they will expect enterprise services -- billing, guaranteed response, etc. No free lunch/get what you pay for.
The only corner case is when an important person at an enterprise customer has a personal account too, or when someone is really being a scrappy startup and trying to run something huge on a personal account due to not having the resources. Usually a good salesperson can handle both of those situations.
Seconded! Happy Kimsufi customer here. I have a few DigitalOcean droplets for customer sites, but after checking the stats and almost never seeing the CPU(s) spike over 50% (if that much) I bought a Kimsufi with 1TB storage and 16GB (non-ECC) RAM and it way outperforms the DO droplets' response time for static assets. I now use it as a static file server for the DO Droplets, plus personal storage.
The network speeds are great and constant, DDOS protection included as standard, and I'm on Gigabit fiber plus close to France so couldn't be happier.
The non-ECC RAM could be a problem over time, but I keep multiple redundant backups and test them regularly, so the small chance of data corruption would only be a nuisance.
Also, the next level up as far as hardware quality is the 'So You Start' range, so look at that too. Depends on your budget and proximity to their French or Canadian data centres.
The display is used for a lot of things, not just for speed. For example during saturday qualifying drivers usually have the time difference of their laps to the leader on the display, and it gets constantly updated.
It's quite interesting to watch cockpit cams and see the effect any little mistake or different line has on the lap time. You can also often see differences in brake balances between drivers and more on them during the race, can be really interesting if you pay attention to that.
Interesting, I didn't know OVH had that service, looks very nice. Although it looks like it's limited to 5GB max file size and 10 Mbit/s bandwidth, which seems very low for anybody with a decent internet connection.
