How do I decide what Cloud Storage to get?

There’s a lot of ways to compare the different features offered by each cloud storage provider. They all compete on some aspects, like pricing and file-limits, but some also offer unique features. Let’s examine these metrics.

Price

Every provider competes on price. While many services offer free options, especially ones targeted at individuals, servers are expensive to run, prices for business plans can range from a few dollars a month to thousands per year.

Companies usually offer multiple plans at different price points, which in turn offer different benefits. These include how much space you’re allowed—which we’ll go into more detail on shortly—but can include other features.

Google Drive, for example, offers integrated analytics for its business plan, which can be a useful advantage for a company looking to expand its marketing.

You could also get access to things like additional tech support from the provider when things go wrong, or detailed logs of who uploaded or edited files and when.

Space

In many ways, this is the most important thing about any cloud storage provider.

Your provider will only ever let you put so many files online. Once you hit their cap, you will either have to delete some of your old work or pay for a more expensive plan.

In reality, many providers offer caps that are so high that it’s hard to imagine ever hitting them. Microsoft’s OneDrive, for example, has a standard plan for one terabyte, which is equivalent to around five hundred hours of movie-grade video.

That means that if you know you’re never going to use more than a few gigabytes—likely the case if you’re working with text documents—there’s little point in paying for more space than you’ll need.

Reliability

Ultimately, cloud storage is only ever as reliable as your internet connection. If that goes down, you lose access to your files—simple as.

But beyond that, you want to choose a host that’s rock-solid and never goes down, because if they do, it’ll be when you need to get to your work most.

Another remember that if the company hosting your data goes under, there’s no guarantee you’ll get your files back. Depending on how important your documents are, it might make sense to go with a company that you know won’t go bankrupt any time soon, like Google or Microsoft.

Collaboration

If you’ve ever emailed Microsoft Word documents around the office, you know how annoying it is to get people collaborating properly on digital documents.

Thankfully, files hosted online can be accessed by multiple people at once with very little stress. Some companies, like Google, even integrate their cloud storage into online office software like Google Docs, which makes working on files together incredibly easy.

Not all cloud storage providers offer these kinds of tools, however. Some are more like bank vaults, where you either put things in or take them out, and while they’re in the vault, nobody can touch them.

If online collaboration is important for your business, make sure the provider offers tools to that end, and that it least works well with your company’s existing workflow.

Upload/download limits

Almost all providers have some cap on how much data you can transfer in a certain amount of time, usually a day. These limits are usually quite large—in the realm of several hundred gigabytes—but it’s good to know that they’re there.

If multiple users are all downloading one large file, for instance, like a video file, you might find yourself hitting a low limit.

Some providers, like Amazon S3, sidestep this by having no rate limits at all. Instead, they use a pay-as-you-go model where you’re only charged for the data you actually use.

It’s worth considering how much traffic your online files will be getting. If you only expect to be working with text documents, for instance, you can save yourself a fair bit of money by going with a provider with low daily limits.