Hmmcast #159 mp4

Since Google improved upon their Gmail spam filtering and auto-deletion, I haven’t had any problems with the 2.8 GB (and growing still, right?) storage space allotted, but that doesn’t stop the Google Giants from offering additional storage to others who might need or want it — at a fee.

Using Google Purchase Storage you can buy up to 250 GB of more storage for $500 a year. 6GB will set you back 20 bones a year.

Microsoft Live Skydrive
Microsoft has also released a beta of Live Skydrive which offers 500 MB of space for free to store and share files.

Pictured above, when I first logged in with my @live account it showed me as having “no name” and even after I updated the profile, I still had no name in Skydrive (bug?). So I switched to my established .NET account, the artist formerly known as Passport, navigated back to skydrive.live.com, accepted the terms and there I was, complete with my dusty Live Spaces profile.

Using Skydrive is straightforward. Just upload a document, picture or video from your hard drive. File size is limited to 50MB per file which could be a problem with videos. Today’s Hmmcast demonstrates how easy it is to upload a video and add it to your blog.

As Read Write Web notes, the online storage scene is a crowded field. I think Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft will be more successful than most the established smaller players simply because of who they are. People who already have an established Picasa photo account or Live Spaces blog will be more likely to want to acquire more storage in those applications than seek out a third party option.

500MB isn’t very much space for video which is currently the only thing I use for storage outside our web hosting and Libsyn gives me 250 MB of fresh space every 30 days to add new videos for $120 a year. Same deal on bandwidth (no additional bandwidth charges).

I can definitely see the advantage in something like Amazon’s S3 storage for sites and services that need to scale up to huge audiences and/or offer gigantic files and have been keeping that in mind as a way to minimize hosting costs.

But don’t forget your web host
If storage is all you need and not a bunch of bandwidth to burn, consider contacting your website hosting company. We added an extra 80GB drive to one of our dedicated servers a couple years ago and the hosting company just gave it to us — for free. Normally they would have made it a one time charge of 100 bucks which included mounting to the dedicated box. I’m guessing that same hundred bones would get more like 200 GB+ drive today. No additional monthly fee, no hassles, just extra storage added to your website.

You can have this storage space placed in non-public areas if you want private online storage space.

• Gates anti-spam 1 year progress report
• Gmail increases storage to 2GB?
• Google flirting with terabyte e-mail limit for Gmail?
• Gmail spam filter sucks too, 3 GB of spam in less than 6 months
• Gmail adds 30-day auto spam removal … I think
• Gmail worst fear realized - Gigabitten - no mass deletion feature