this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
915 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59593 readers
3396 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem here is that Google's "unlimited" plan was real, but it was for the G-Suite Enterprise product, which they discontinued. Two years ago, they started moving everything and everyone to a new product offering, Google Workspace. The Enterprise plans there have unlimited* data, and that asterisk is important, because it specifies that unlimited is no longer unlimited, which is dumb. It's a pool of data shared between users, and each user account contributes 5TB towards the pool, capping at 300 users. From there, if I remember correctly, additional 10TB chunks cost $300/month.
I feel bad for this guy, but the writing has been on the wall for years now. Google has changed their account structure and platform costs to discourage this type of use.
I heard there was a process for requesting additional data, but you have to actually pay for the 5 users and they’ll bump it a few TB every couple months on request. That’s from people reporting their experience with support, so it might not be totally consistent.
I kind of get it though, people hear “unlimited storage” and then don’t even make an effort to be efficient with that space, and just want to keep everything forever. There’s a real cost to that storage, and it’s higher than many think since it’s not just a single HDD like many would have sitting on their desk but a series of arrays/pools and all the related systems to ensure reliability and uptime. They probably did some calculation where 99% of users would be profitable even with their “unlimited storage” and eating it on the other 1% was a reasonable advertising cost. Over time that calculation changed and they had to update the service.