Google Slashes Online Data Backup and Storage Prices

November 11, 2009
By Ezra Brook

Twice The Data For A Quarter The Price

In its official company blog site, Google has just announced pricing structure for its online backup and storage services. Google has given users double the capacity for exactly 25% of the price. The new rates give you 20 GB for $5 per year, or, as Google puts it “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.”

This works out to about 2.1 cents per month per GB or 42 cents per month for the 20GB storage. This is incredibly cheaper than most other services.

The 20 GB that Google is selling, which is enough space for 10,000 (5 mega pixels) photos, is only one of their new pricing tiers. Users are able to upgrade to the next level of storage capacity as their data grows. Google has an optional 16 terabytes storage plan, which is capable of storing 8 million full resolution photos, at a cost of $4,096 per year.

The announcement is only a price reduction, no new product or feature is being introduced. Google credits the falling cost of storage to the rise of cloud computing. Google points to the ascendancy of netbooks and “net centric hardware,” for making cloud storage a vital component of data use and the larger internet.

It looks like that Google is trying to compete Microsoft’s SkyDrive  in this area as Microsoft has outperformed Google . SkyDrive offers a free 25 GB of online storage for your files and also serves as the central repository for Windows Live Photos and documents created via the new Office Web Applications (which is the equivalent of Google Docs) service.

But, the the storage system only works with Gmail and the photo sharing service Picasa. It sounds that, at this time, Google has not added other services, like Google Docs, music and videos. Google is not talking about the long rumored GDrive, either. The question is: Is this price reduction geared towards enticing future GDrive users? Time will tell.

Google might be subsidizing this low price for a while, but the trend is clear and plain, cloud storage is going to become faster, cheaper, and more reliable.

The pricing options for Google storage are found on this page.

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Google Offers A 16 Terabyte Cloud Drive For $4,096 A Year