- cross-posted to:
- datahoarder@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- datahoarder@lemmy.ml
Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits::Some people have taken “as much space as you need” too literally.
I just don’t get it. If it’s unlimited - in what universe is using it beyond 15TB considered abuse?
I get the reseller part, I get the stupid chia mining part. But if they can say that was the problem - then get rid of those users, as clearly you have already identified them. Don’t shift the blame away from your dumbass marketing team onto your users and play an innocent company.
I can’t believe how much support dropbox is getting. People seem to accept, without questioning, every bollocks pr statement these days.
I worked for a company that was offering unlimited storage to its too tier customers.
I brought it up in a meeting when we first started talking about it.
“Okay but you don’t mean unlimited. That’s bad PR waiting to happen.”
What did they say to your remark?
Roughly
“what do you mean?”
“You cannot offer something that doesn’t exist. If Amazon decided to become a client, we’d be in a world of hurt.”
“It’s fine none of our clients use more than a few hundred gigs”
This was in 2018. They still offer unlimited storage. So I guess, what do I know?
Wow that’s low. If I’m paying for unlimited I expect to at least go over 2TB since I have the space
May I ask what the company is? You don’t have to disclose it publicly if you don’t want, I have matrix setup on my profile here.
What’s the company? I need to migrate away from Dropbox.
what would they do if some user just decides to use more than their “limit”? like hundreds of TB?
Boot them, most likely. Or eat the cost, and look to shutter the free space/apply limits ASAP.
Not unlike Amazon Cloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox here. There was someone on the datahoarders Reddit who famously shoved a Petabyte of Data into their Cloud Drive offering, and likely contributed to it being shut down as a result.
likely contributed to it being shut down as a result.
hope they had an offline backup.
Got thrown out of a window
Especially since 15TB isn’t all that big. It’s not tiny, but it’s also not out of the reach of a reasonably high end computer, or for a video editor who might need a lot of space for raws/recordings.
It’s not like they’re looking at users eating up Petabytes of data, or something silly, where some restriction might be understandable.
Wait, the cap is 15TB? I run a small image processing business and I’m right about there with my businesses data, currently.
…guess its time to NAS, but I’d really rather pay someone else than assume the hassle
A NAS really isn’t that much of a hassle once you get it up and running. I’ve got a Synology DS918+ and love it. Although I’m sure you’d want something bigger (and newer) for supporting a small business.
That would be fine from a storage standpoint, except that the up front investment is significant compared to what I’ve paid Dropbox so far. I have to be my own resilience, redundancy, security, and and integration specialist. Can you even connect to a NAS on Android? I’d have to set up tasker or something for auto photo upload. Our power is not reliable and goes out frequently. I would have to learn how to expose it to the world outside my network. I’d have to monitor and replace dead drives. And that’s just me, while the other people on my account also need space and access, where they either have to set up their own NAS or use mine, so I’d have to look into file sequestration. I’ll have to re-automate everything to not use Dropbox APIs. There’s a much bigger mental load hidden behind “getting it up and running” that made paying someone else attractive. I’d’ve paid up to triple for continued unlimited storage, but now that there’s no option entirely and the highest limit is stupidly low, I have to rethink my entire workflow.
I’m on my 15 so I don’t have time to list everything but a lot of your assumptions are wrong about what you’d have to learn/ need to set up on your own. Synology has a suite of apps for all your use cases that makes it quite easy to set up. And there’s apps for your phone (yes android) to connect to it from outside of your network.
A good weekend of shmedium effort and you can have it all set up and running no problem.
If your powers unreliable btw you should invest in a battery backup UPS to protect sensitive products.
Ah, I do have a UPS for sensitive electronics, though I need another one for some other networking equipment anyway. That does make it feel more approachable. Maybe when my life stops taking a big steamy dump I’ll look into this with more earnest. Thanks for the overview!
You make excellent points. I think the key difference for me when I got the NAS was that I wasn’t replacing an existing system. That and I actually enjoy playing with storage and networking, so I’m able to cover most of those bases you mentioned myself.
For the power issues, you may want to look into getting a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for anything you want to stay powered. Larger ones can get pretty expensive, but you can usually find some smaller ones for a decent price that I think would be fine for small business use. I’ve used and had good experience with UPSs made by APC.
I do have a UPS for some of my stuff. I was planning on getting another small one for some networking stuff, but no reason I couldn’t get a bigger one to cover another device.
How the fuck do you abuse unlimited access? This is just a company blaming an idea that was always going to be unsustainable on their customers and not their own damn lack of forethought.
It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses, and I’m guessing reselling your unlimited data was against the ToS.
It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses
And why the fuck would that matter? If they can’t handle some random’s porn and piracy collection, how the fuck would they handle a legit business? lol
Reselling an account would hurt their bottom line, but still have no effect on providing the storage. Imposing a limit doesn’t stop that though, other than perhaps by making the product worthless and therefore unworthy of reselling.
Because some people where using it for crypto mining some coins that depend on storage space.
why the fuck would that matter?
Because it “hurt their bottom line” in some measurable way. Yeah I’d be pissed if I were a subscriber of this plan. But either you accept the caveats of using someone else’s infrastructure or you roll your own. ¯\(ツ)/¯
If you offer me “unlimited Hotdogs” and proceed to be offended by me eating infinite Hotdogs, you did not offer “unlimited Hotdogs”.
That’s “false advertising” Baron von Jenius.
That’s “false advertising” Baron von Jenius
🤣 Kudos for being the first to lobby that particular insult 🍻
They advertised a service, people used the service and it was as advertised, the service was deemed to be unprofitable due to usage, they announced the discontinuation of the service and no longer advertise it. I don’t see any mention of unlimited storage in any of their plans
https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
https://www.dropbox.com/plansAs long as subscribers to the unlimited plan retain unlimited storage through the end of the term for which they had already paid (which I didn’t see any indication, then DropBox is fulfilling the terms of the service they sold. And the last two paragraphs of the article seem to indicate that DropBox is indeed doing that
To help legitimate business users transition, Dropbox says that “customers using less than 35TB of storage per license” can keep however much they’re using plus an additional 5TB for five years “at no additional charge.” Organizations using more than 35TB will get the same deal for one year, but they’ll need to deal with Dropbox directly to work out pricing. As a baseline, adding 1TB of storage without adding additional users will cost either $10 a month or $96 a year.
New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you’ll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans. Existing users will be “gradually migrated” to the new plans starting on November 1, and they’ll be notified at least 30 days before the migration happens.
So I don’t think false advertising applies here.
This was dumb AF anyways. If you really have a problem with a few large accounts, you just make their access rates to their data atrocious. There’s no way the plan guarantees an access speed.
They didn’t mean unlimited use. They meant “sign up, forget about it and pay us forever”.
Corporate bootlickers: OMG they’re actually using our unlimited service as if they were unlimited. THIS IS ABUSE!1!
Isn’t there a special term in court for entering a contract that you have no intention of fulfilling as you promised in the first place?
You can’t abuse unlimited. That’s why it’s called “UNlimited.” I hate this two faced, corporate back sludge that always, and I mean always, puts it on the consumer as if they did something wrong. When in reality, it’s the company that is redlining or needs to boost those unsustainable goal of doubling revenue every quarter, ad infinitum.
The real narrative is Dropbox needs money so they are scrambling to cut every expense. No matter what spin they put on it.
If they were just honest about it and say “this is expensive so we need to put the prices up”, I would have a lot more respect for that.
“Times are tough we just can’t do unlimited anymore.” What’s so hard about being honest in business?!?
Bad PR, that’s why.
You can DDOS using an “unlimited” VPS, and DDOS the same provider. Is that abuse? Of course it is. You can’t expect a for profit to allow people to upload petabytes of junk all at once.
It depends on the ToS. DDoSing might be considered unreasonable use.
But if you’re using VPS to stream 4K content 24/7, that would be heavy and reasonable use.
Similarly, if I take the unlimited Dropbox plan and resell it, that’s probably against the ToS.
If I’m uploading 50TB of blu ray rips for backups, that’s… Heavy use but entirely acceptable based on what they’re advertising.
For your last sentence, Dropbox can’t tell whether those are legitimate backups that the DMCA gives you the right to, or rips from a piracy site. Uploading data that’s all 1’s is just dumb and is designed to “test” the server, in the same way a teenager might test their stepdad.
Just violating the TOS, which means you are using a service or product outside its intended usage.
Downloading from a plan that has no cap, even if you download a lot, is simply making use of the service for its intended purpose. (Which obviously isn’t to DDOS someone.)
Why you’re defending DB here, a faceless corporation, is probably a better point of discussion.
You shouldn’t try to benchmark some random server by uploading and downloading files that consist of the bytes
FF
repeatedly. Store all the crap you want, just don’t ruin it for others.
everything here is wrong, and blaming the users is wrong. Please try to read past the PR speak. and shame on ars for not doing that.
the unlimited plan is going away to force companies that were using it, to switch to their new unlimited plan which is now called Enterprise and will generate a lot more money for them. The plan still exists, they’ve changed the requirements so you can only get it if you spend a lot of money.
Users: Use the product as it was designed and advertised.
Corporations:
I remember in the 90s, my dial-up provider started offering an “unmetered” plan with no per minute charge (for younger people, believe it or not we were once charged by the minute for connecting to the internet). After a short while we were inundated with emails from the ISP complaining that people were “abusing the service” by going on the internet for “hours at a time”. Just reminded me of this and how it’s an old excuse.
No, you can’t “abuse” an unlimited service by using too much, it’s unlimited.
Can you even imagine how lame someone’s life must be to go on the Internet for hours at a time though? Oh wait…
Then it was never unlimited to begin with, wtf?
Like when Microsoft took away unlimited OneDrive and wrote a passive aggressive blog post about how some dude used it to store like 75TB of movies
Don’t offer unlimited if you can’t deliver unlimited. FFS
Don’t use the fucking word unlimited if it has limits? Something that has a limit, no matter how high, is not unlimited.
What they meant to say was “We didn’t have the foresight to monetize these heavy users, so we will be doing that now. But first we’ll create the problem…”
Calling it “abuse” is a weird PR move. If your service is good enough, this is bound to happen with an unlimited storage plan. This is basically a win on their part since they got people to sign up for their service. Why shame your user base?
“Abused”? Is it unlimited or not? I don’t see how as much as you need can be taken too literally. It’s either true or it isn’t.
“Abused” service they were advertised. Now it is misadvertisement.