In terms of cost all the four services are giving free cloud storage service but being free they are limited in some or the other way. As a free storage, Dropbox provides 2 GB of free storage space and a daily bandwidth of 10 GB, Google Drive provides 5 GB of storage with unlimited bandwidth, SkyDrive provides 7 GB (Earlier it was 25 GB) with unlimited bandwidth as that in Google Drive. Box is a bit different and provides 5 GB’s of free storage but a monthly bandwidth of 10 GBs.
For premium users there are very different plans from all the four services :
Dropbox1Dropbox : With Dropbox you can have two types of accounts, one is the Pro account which is further of three types, 100 GB for $9.99, 200 GB for $19.99 and 500 GB for $49.99, the prices are for monthly billing. The other one is for teams, a team can have a minimum of 5 members and for 5 members you get 1000 GB’s of storage and costs you $795 a year. For every additional team member you get 200 GBs storage at a price of $125 a year.
Google Drive : It offers monthly plans which are priced at $2.49/month for 25 GB storage, $4.99 for 100 GB storage, $9.99 for 200 GB storage and so on up to 16 TBs which is priced at $799.99 a month.
Microsoft SkyDrive: In addition to the 7 GB free storage, you can buy more space at $10 for 20 GB , $25 for 50 GB and $50 for 100 GB. That means in total you will get 27 GBs, 57 GBs and 107 GBs with $10, $25 and $50 respectively.Box1Box : Box has come up with 3 types of premium storages, the Personal, Business and Enterprises. For personal storage it offers 25 GB storage at $10 and 50 GB storage at $20. For business storage you can have 3 to 500 users with online storage of 1000 GBs at $15 per user per month. For Enterprises the users can be unlimited with an unlimited storage but you need to get into talks with them for the pricing quotes.
In order to compare their performance and reliability we can upload the same file to all the above discussed services. According to Pingdom it was observed that all the four services gave almost similar results except from little dissimilarity. It was observed that the best performer was Box.com however Google Drive showed some minor outages but was somewhat close to a perfect result. If we talk about Microsoft SkyDrive and Dropbox, they experienced few outages, very high if we compare them to Box and Google Drive. When checked for a month Box.com showed no downtime, Google Drive was down for 1 minute and Dropbox and SkyDrive for 13 and 15 minutes .
These were just four of the best free online cloud storage services we used. There are many more services like these which you can try, it all depends upon what exactly are your demands. But if you are new to this and want to start off then you can surely go for anyone of these.
There are many people who are in love with Dropbox since it has proved to be a very useful tool which gives a very good performance level and reliability at all levels. Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, all are focusing on storing your data right on the cloud, hence now you do not need a hard drive which are more prone of crashing and you might loss all your data. So with their storage tools you no more have to worry about internal storage space and backups.
P.S. All of them are great and are best at their service. But Box.com is good for the Enterprises. It already has 140,000 companies that share and access their content using Box. And for personal use we recommend Dropbox. It has larger bandwidth for file sharing and the storage can also be increased up to 18 GB (from 2 GB) by inviting your friends and uploading images from other devices to Dropbox.
LINKS: Dropbox, Googledrive, Sky Drive, Box.
0 comments:
Post a Comment