Apr 25, 2012

Cloud Drive Price Comparison: Amazon, Apple, Google, Box, Dropbox, Skydrive and SugarSync


Price can be an important factor when selecting the right cloud hosting service. With that many services in the field, it is important to compare prices, as much as it is important to look at the feature sets individual services offer. Like pricing, features differ a lot between services.
It starts with the supported operating systems. Google Drive for instance supports Windows, Macs and Android at the moment, while Microsoft’s SkyDrive Windows, Mac, iOS and Windows Phone. If you need to access your files on specific devices, you need to make sure that they are supported by the cloud hosting service of your choosing.
Back to pricing. All services offer Gigabytes of free storage. If you need more, you need to pay either a monthly subscription fee, or a yearly fee. Free storage ranges from 2 Gigabyte that Dropbox offers to the 25 Gigabyte that existing Microsoft SkyDrive customers get. And if that is not confusing enough, some services give you extra Gigabytes if you refer other users, or take part in a promotion.
Online storage pricing differs immensely between services. The cheapest service as of now is Microsoft’s SkyDrive service that is providing users with up to 100 Gigabytes of extra storage for $4.16 per month. The most expensive service when it comes to 100 Gigabytes of extra storage is Dropbox, which asks for $19.99 per month for the same amount of storage.
It is likely that we will see adjustments being made to high priced storage, as users might migrate to cheaper services otherwise, provided that those cheaper services offer the same features that are important to the individual user.
The following screenshot displays the free space and extra space pricing of the following cloud hosting services: Amazon Cloud DriveApple iCloudBoxDropboxGoogle DriveMicrosoft SkyDrive and SugarSync.
The prices highlighted in red indicate the cheapest storage pricing up to this point. Some services may offer more online space for a cheaper price than other services offer less storage space. Click on the image to view it in full screen.
cloud hosting price comparison
As you can see, Microsoft is offering the cheapest pricing up to a 100 Gigabyte of extra storage. After that it is Google Drive that is taking over, but only because Microsoft is currently not offering additional pricing information on the website.
If pricing is the most important criteria, SkyDrive is the cloud hosting service to look at, provided that it ticks all of your other boxes. It provides more free space out of the box than any of the other services, and offers the cheapest pricing right now if you do not need more than a 100 Gigabyte of extra space.via[ghacks]

1 comment:

  1. Google will definitely push users to GDrive with better email integration. Waiting for the battle and drops in prices..

    ReplyDelete