Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

Consumer storage service provider Mozy will stop offering unlimited storage while increasing fees for limited online storage. The company, a large consumer online storage provider, made the announcement after demand for cloud storage increased 50 percent over the past year.

Mozy, owned by EMC (News - Alert), has offered its MozyHome consumer storage service since 2006. The service has been available for $4.95 per month for unlimited online backup. Consumers will now pay $5.99 per month for 50 GB of backup through the new pricing, or $9.99 per month for 125 GB. Existing customers will have until March 1 before they are required to switch over to a new plan. Customers will also have to pay additional fees to add extra computers to their storage packages.

Mozy has more than one million users now, and about 10 percent of them are considered "power users" who use up enormous amounts of storage space, said Russ Stockdale, senior vice president of product marketing at Mozy. He said power users monopolize storage space for files like high-definition video, photos and music, and many end up converting their analog data to electronic for online storage as well.

"The analog camcorder became digital, and the digital camcorder became high-definition digital. Then all that stuff got built into your phone," said Stockdale. "Now you have people carrying high-quality digital devices and exhibiting a behavior where they reflexively store it. There's been a pressure across the industry on consumer plans that offer unlimited capacity."

Power users take up as much capacity as the other 90 percent of users put together, according to Stockdale. The company currently stores more than 70 petabytes of data for its customers.

Gartner (News - Alert) analyst Adam Couture believes that most other storage providers will be forced to change their pricing models as well, due to crowding in the cloud. "Others are already doing things like bandwidth throttling to help control the volume of data being stored and limiting the types of files you can back up, but as far as raising prices we haven't seen that yet by others," he said.

Courture is a self-admitted power user of Carbonite's service and believes that company is losing money on him. "But the philosophy of these companies has always been that power users are balanced out by their average users."

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