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4 Good Reasons To Ditch Your Dropbox
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Dropbox, founded in 2007, was one of the first to offer a breed of “cloud” backup that even the foggiest of customers could understand. But as the company has grown, so has its competition, so the time may ripe to consider the alternatives.
There’s creeping consumer competition from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and upstart Box.net, among others. (Note that they’re all hitting Dropbox on the developer side of the equation as well.)
But Dropbox itself has created a host of reasons to consider ditching the service:
Reason 1. High Prices
Dropbox is built atop Amazon S3, a remote storage service developed by the online retail giant. That makes Dropbox, at least for now, a technology middleman between customers and their actual storage provider. One downside to this middleman status is that it makes Dropbox a “single point of failure” potentially preventing people from accessing their data. But the larger consequence is on its pricing.
For so-called “redundant” storage, which mitigates the risk that Amazon drops your data on the floor, Amazon charges about 10 cents per gigabyte per month. At Dropbox, the first 2GB is free – and the company offers lots of ways to expand this free storage up to 10GB through its grassroots affiliate strategies. However, for anything more than, say, a handful of high-quality videos you have to pony up big bucks: $100 a month to “lease” 100GB of storage via a “pro” account. That’s ten times the price that Amazon charges its direct S3 customers.
To compare, consider that consumer storage on Google Drive and Amazon Cloud Drive is about half the price, and that a single month’s $100 Dropbox Pro could buy you a 500GB portable hard drive – whose storage you actually own.
If you want to take storage into your own hands and use these companies’ developer-friendly options, Amazon and Google will also charge you a nominal bandwidth fee to pull your data out of storage. But then again, such fine-grained control allows developers – and consumers – to pay more or pay less depending on the level of service they seek.
Dropbox by design must charge more than the cloud storage provider it works against. Its margins could be razor thin, but they’re not, and it’s been noted that very few companies could get away with such a scheme.
Reason 2. Lack Of Innovation
Believed to be becoming more “IT friendly” and with APIs that are getting better, Dropbox is constantly improving its service. But recent and future areas of improvement are not wholly apparent to average customers. Aside from its ”Packrat” service, there’s very little storage-wise that distinguishes Dropbox from the storage hoi poloi. Industry insiders call it “bore-age” for a reason.
Dropbox’s major innovation was file syncing software that “just works,” and no competitor has yet seemed to nail this so elegantly. Another boon for Dropbox is that the service is also available on a panoply of both free and closed environments, from Linux to Apple iOS.
However competitors are catching up to Dropbox in terms of software ease of use and device deployment – and for some users, falling behind the competition. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft are now beginning to compete at the software level even as they crush Dropbox pricing thanks to technology stacks that offer them economies of scale.
Reason 3. Security Questions
Dropbox reportedly pulls some punches behind the scenes that, in effect, help it to goose its margins by insufficiently separating user accounts.
Dropbox has seen its share of security snafus along those lines, including an incident in 2011 that for several hours allowed anyone to log into anyone else’s account without a password. Dropbox later made good, including adding support for so-called “two-factor authentication,” but those in the know have good reason to remain suspicious.
And if potentially sharing your files with other users isn’t scary enough, consider that according to its terms of service, Dropbox reserves the right to delete your account or its contents at any time for a number of reasons.
Reason 4. Switching Is Getting Easier
Dropbox this week upped its game for corporate customers, but the improved features might have come too late. Many big-name businesses and investors are lining up behind competitors like Box.net, who appear set to eat Dropbox’s “enterprise” lunch.
Dropbox will surely hold on to many everyday customers thanks to the relatively high hassle factor to move your stored files. After all, users might not be relying on Dropbox if they already had enough storage to, say, copy over their entire Dropbox into a Google Drive directory and allow that to sync, too.
But the strength of Dropbox’s “barrier to exit” will weaken as devices come stocked with more and cheaper storage hardware. On the other side of things, for users relying on Dropbox not as a cloud backup offer but primarily for its sync capabilities, software improvements from other services will also continue to put downward pressure on Dropbox.
Dropbox was certainly not the first cloud storage provider, and it’s worth considering that it might not be the last.
It’s never been easier to find a reason to ditch your Dropbox, or to actually make the move. So right about now is a good time to make sure you have a backup plan.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/Dtov1YYo8is/4-good-reasons-to-ditch-your-dropbox
2013-02-13 07:45:39
Source: http://someit.com/2013/02/13/4–good-reasons-to-ditch-your/
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Great info.
Ditching Dropbox, Google Drive for technical and security issues, I’ve moved on to Copy for a few months and I have to admit, it’s better than both.
They give you 15GB of free space – 20GB if you sign up via this link: https://copy.com?r=9IfWjn – with a further 2GB for linking to your twitter account.
Basically you start with 22GB and have the ability to earn a further 5GB of free space per referral.
The interface is clean, the program works wonderfully, very fast, supports Wifi Sync and AES256 encryption, and they seem to have a client for just about everything (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android).