Originally posted by UncleVanya the cost of storage has fallen over time pretty steadily. The cost of the service is probably mostly in serving the content reliably and quickly.
Interestingly, the cost of cloud storage HASN'T gone down significantly over the past five years (according to an article I read, not my research). I suspect it's because of the second part of the equation - speed of service. I can buy a 4TB SATA drive for about what I paid for 2TB five years ago (in fact, I did, just last month). However, the JPEGs and DNGs I'm storing now are almost twice as big as the ones from five years ago. I'm also more likely to throw a couple videos into a shoot, so the cost of storing one shoot hasn't gone down - it's stayed the same. The larger files take almost twice as long to load, so I need a faster drive (and a faster PC) to have the same "user experience" that I had five years ago. I suspect the same holds for cloud providers - while the cost for one TB at the same speed may have gone down, they have to continually upgrade every component in the chain or else they are "slow" by the ever-increasing standards of the day.
Originally posted by savoche This part of the site was no doubt disrupted quite badly with the 1 TB free limit as it pulled in lots of people wanting cheap storage only.
I have to say, as a "Pro" subscriber for the past ten years, the complaints about Flickr definitely went up as Yahoo cut staff and offered free terabytes. It started to feel like K-mart - no one goes there except for something cheap, good luck finding an employee if you need one, and some of the people that ARE there are extremely sketchy. As an aside, I wonder how many of the 97% of "free" accounts that aren't over the 1000 picture limit are just robo-scam accounts with NO pictures, or a handful of stolen photos of a Russian glamour model?