2006/05/05

DropSend and everything else

Okay, I admit. I’m way behind on learning what all these fancy Ajax Web 2.0 Ruby on Rails start-ups actually are doing. I’ve looked briefly at things like the work by 37signals, and been pretty impressed with it all.

It does seem like it’s possible to do the majority of work within a web browser these days. Anyway, I bring this up not because I like to point out my flaws, but as a convenient way to justify the fact that when I mentioned but two online storage providers in my previous post I implied in my head that there were no doubt more things I’d left out.

DropSend is a Box.net-style online storage provider, with the angle for distributing files that are too large to send by email. Their pricing is flexible enough to go all the way to 250 GB for the high price of $99 per month, but the fact they offer it I’m pretty impressed by. They give 250 MB for free, and $5 per month will give you 1 GB. This is similar to Box.net’s pricing as well.

Where am I going with all of this? There’s actually heaps of products out there, apparently with very variable pricing at this stage while the market is young. It boggles the mind that people have found better backup solutions using web browsers rather than clever network-based techniques. In the long run, will the remote distributed method end up scaling more efficiently and provide a better solution? Well, at this stage, there’s not really any competition so I don’t see why not!