Cream of the cloud: The top premium web services
Photo by Flickr user zerega
There has been much talk in the past year about cloud computing. Some like it; some don’t. Say what you will, but there are some services that can only be provided through the cloud. As a result, the concept has been around forever and will probably never leave. There are some really stellar services available that make your computing life a lot easier. Several weeks back, I posted a question on Ask.Metafilter asking what are the favorite premium online services. Some of the answers I expected while others I had never heard of. Let’s hit the highlights (in no particular order).
- Flickr- This was one of the most oft repeated responses. Flickr is a fan favorite. It has a huge community and a great featureset for organizing and sharing photos. If you’re going to use a photo sharing service, it’s a pretty safe bet your friends already have accounts here because Flickr offers both free and paid accounts. The free account limits uploading to 100MB per month and only allows you access to your last 200 pictures. The paid account lifts both of these limits and comes with a few other perks as well like video storage for video up to 90 seconds. Paid accounts are $24.95 per year.
- SmugMug- SmugMug fans are quick to talk about features and support which are the two areas that make this service stand out. It is a photo-sharing service like Flickr, but it doesn’t have quite the userbase of the Flickr service. They do not offer a free version of their service, but users may share with people who do not have a membership. SmugMug has three different levels of accounts offering different features. Each of these is more pricey than Flickr’s service which is probably why they have fewer users. Accounts range from $39.95 to $149.95 per year.
- Dropbox- If you want an easy way to store files online, Dropbox has to be it. Install the client, tie it in to your account, and drop files into the Dropbox folder. You can also install the client on multiple machine, link all of them to your account, and wait for it to synchronize your Dropbox folder across all computers. It supports Mac, PC, and Linux. This is another service with both free and paid offerings. The free service offers a healthy 2GB of storage, but the paid version (at $9.99 per month or $99 per year) gives you a whopping 50GB of storage space.
- Backblaze- Get unlimited online backup from Backblaze for $5 per month per computer. It supports Mac and PC. Backblaze prides itself on requiring little to no user intervention. It backs up all the files on your computer. Everything. If you lose your data, you can redownload it or, for a fee, they will mail you the files on DVD or an external hard drive.
- Safari- O’Reilly Publishing offers online access to a huge library of technical books. Users may access 10 titles at a time for $22.99 per month or an unlimited number of titles for $42.99 per month. If you need to catch up on your knowledge or if you just need to keep up with the ever-changing tech landscape, this would be a cheap alternatives to purchasing a plethora of books at $40 to $60 each.
- lynda.com- For $25 per month, lynda.com offers a plethora of video tutorials for many current creative and programming technologies like Flash, Photoshop, and PHP. It seems like a great quick way to get up to speed on a particular technology that you need familiarity with for an upcoming project. You can watch some of the early lessons for free before you buy. They are very well-done.
- MetaFilter- A predictable response coming from the community, but this is truly justified. The cost is $5 for a membership. That’s not $5 per month or per year. Just $5. This entitles you to post on the “community weblog” at metafilter.com once per 24 hours and ask a question at ask.metafilter.com once per week. I have never actually posted to the blog, but I frequently tap the community for answers and am always surprised by the quality and depth of knowledge. Almost any question no matter how specialized or obscure receives attention.
I’m not entirely sold on the cloud as a place to create and store data. I will probably never subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe and be locked in to paying $100 per year for access to my data and services I have become dependent upon. However, some services are uniquely suited to being outsourced to the cloud. In these services, there is often value and justification for a reasonable subscription fee. We are not returning to the days of dumb terminals in which most of our activities take place outside our own machine, but people are beginning to realize the merits of the emerging trend of “the cloud.”
What makes MyOtherDrive unique, is that we offer full featured online backup that is very easy to use. We offer 128-bit encryption that occurs on the your PC before your files are uploaded to our servers, which protects them going across the Internet and keeps them unreadable even to us. Our automated backup is a snap to schedule. It has change detection so that only new and changed files are sent up each night.
And unlike many competitors, one MyOtherDrive account can be used on more than one computer.
Also, we over much more than just online backup. Our service supports public and private file sharing. You can set up links to files that require a user to enter a password before access the link. Same for folders.
Another very unique feature of MOD is the ability to copy and move files and folders between accounts – all on the backend – with no upload. That eliminates a lot of upload / download time.
We support grabbing a file from a URL and saving it into your account. All of this, for a price that is often 1/2 to 1/3 of many of our competitors.
We just completed our planned data center upgrade, hence the temporary outage you experienced.
For true online backup, though, you need to go with a service like ours that supports more than pictures, large files, and encryption.
Our service is 4.99 / month for 100gb backup or 9.99 / month for 400gb…and our service is amazing.
I’m having a bit of trouble hitting your site right now. What does it offer that the others do not?
good short list of services. any premium service at the top of its nitche should certainly charge a reasonable fee. they develop a service that fits a certain need, people will buy. i have tried and reviewed some on the list and you mirror my finds. i am a fan of smugmug myself.
Thank you, Christian. I wish I could have gone with SmugMug, but I chose Flickr for three reasons: I already know Flickr; it’s cheaper; and I love that the community is so huge. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like SmugMug.
How about vtc.com, which offers over 80,000 software video tutorials for $30 a month?…It’s been going since 1996, a bit longer online than lynda.com, with more variety of courses…
Looks like a cool service as well. I’m checking out one of the demo AJAX tutorials right now…
Thanks, Mark.