When they generate dozens of GB of photos and videos just with their phone every year, it becomes less profitable. Offering unlimited storage to individuals who create 1 or 2 GB of photos per year can be OK. This is a possible explanation for Google’s turnaround. Thus, the volume of data created every day by our digital uses has exploded and this is not over if we believe certain projections ( see this study by Statista). Meanwhile, when you took a photo with your compact digital camera 15 years ago, it only weighed 100 or 150 Kb, i.e. Even a 15-second kitten video weighs 50 MB. With a latest generation smartphone, it can be as much as 10 MB.
In 2020, when you take a photo with your smartphone, it weighs an average of 2 MB. While the cost of hosting has decreased over the last 20 years, the volume of data created has exploded in parallel! Read also : Where are photos stored with Piwigo ? An exponential amount of data And then there is the development and maintenance of the software, web and mobile apps used by end users to manage their files. You need staff to maintain, monitor and secure them. Behind a virtual “Drive” or “Cloud”, there are huge machines, which consume energy. Since storage space is costing less and less, why should we pay for what was previously offered free of charge?įirst of all, even if the cost of storage space has fallen since the early 2000s, it still has a cost. This decision may seem paradoxical, given that the cost of data hosting has fallen dramatically over the last 20 years. The new pricing of Google hosting offers The true cost of online hosting It may not seem like much, but this announcement is an important signal: after years of “everything free”, the giants of the internet have decided to monetize data hosting, even for “small” volumes. Starting on June 15th 2021, you will have to pay to host more than 15 GB of data at Google (including your Gmail account and Google Drive). Many users looking for an alternative to Flickr fell back on Google Photos, which offered free and unlimited hosting of your photos (in exchange of the files being compressed).īut Google changed the game two weeks ago, announcing the end of its illimited free offer. Read also : Why Flickr could not remain free for ever Users were screaming scandal, but from our side, we found it rather normal. In November 2018, Flickr, the online photo hosting and sharing service, announced an overhaul of its pricing model: free user accounts hosting more than 1,000 photos had to take out a paid subscription, after what some of their photos would be deleted. What does it mean? Why this decision? What alternatives to GAFAM for data hosting? When the internet giants say stop to the free model The news made a lot of noise: around November 12th 2020, Google announced that it would end free and unlimited hosting on Google Photos.
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