Is It Reasonable To Offer 1 Terabyte of Storage As A File Hoster?

Offering the biggest storage capacities of all the file hosts on the Internet will surely drive some traffic to a file hoster’s website. Oosah did just that with the announcement that they would offer 1 Terabyte - that is 1024 Gigabytes - to everyone signing up for their file hosting service. And while they surely have calculated with a mean storage usage instead of the maximum it would still be apparent that a free file host would have serious troubles coping with the demand.

The upload limits are 250 Megabytes for video files and 50 Megabytes for mp3 and images. The user guide is still speaking of a 2 Gigabyte limit per user which contradicts the information on the homepage of the service most likely because the user guide has not been updated with the new information.

The options offered by Oosah surely look nice. Besides the storage capacities the service offered Flickr, Youtube, Facebook and Picasa integration, an iPhone client, playlists, galleries, slideshows, public and private sharing and a easy to use web interface.

A new announcement on the homepage and on the blog seem to suggest that the developers did not expect the popularity of the service: Uploads have been disabled temporarily and Flickr integration disabled.

That problem is homemade on the other hand. The Internet has seen multiple services that made a huge announcement and could not live up to their promises because of the massive media coverage and exponential user increase.

The insight from the situation should be to make sure that the important data is backed up properly before rushing to new services.