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Forum Discussion
No additional space on Business Advanced
Dear community,
I'm here to advice that the support have been denying us additional space for two weeks, first telling us that there was a momentary problem, then that we had made a request before...
cgi_ltd so the $60K was a true number they quoted you? For reference for everyone else, now that Dropbox is reaching out to people, you have 600TB and that would factually cost you $60K per year.
Yup! They originally wanted $70k, I told them no way and bounced me back the $60k quote. If you have 500 - 600TB, these are the prices I have been getting quoted.
https://i.ibb.co/4JQ4ww5/Screenshot-20231018-094814-Adobe-Acrobat.jpg
- That is a huge markup!
If you're an administrator and you were to price out drives, you're looking at ~5-6kUSD for that much storage. And then maybe another 400USD/year for electricity to power the drives. Then throw in maybe another 2400USD/year for a fast internet connection. You're looking at an initial investment of ~8kUSD and an ongoing expense of 2800USD/year; a far cry from Dropbox's price point.
The idea that Dropbox's "tools" are worth 50-60kUSD/year is just insane.
I imagine there is going to be a run on hdds/hbas/etc as people/companies migrate to local storage. Get ready for it everyone! We have a modest 34TB - we ran out of space today and have been told by DB support that we should try deleting files, or we can upgrade to enterprise - I did not bother to ask how much. So the solution to our storage issues, recommended by our chosen cloud storage solution, is to delete our files? Brilliant.
I do feel for them if they have been hit hard by mining, but surely they will end up losing lots of customers?
Has anyone considered using BOX? We need to find an alternative solution quickly. We already have google drive, but I find the uploads t be throttled so it takes too long to deliver the images to our clients.
- Box is even worse, when I asked to be quoted for 400TB of space on their most expensive enterprise plan, and told them we would migrate the data ( so you can set your crypt storage ). They said we wouldn't be a good fit for them, because they are now enforcing upload limits of 1TB per user, per month. So they didn't even bother me with a quote. Just said, nope, not gonna work.
- Box does throttling as well, the limit is on a per seat basis and around 1 TB of bandwidth a month on the business license.
Thanks for your response. I think we're going to have to go back to local storage to backup our projects. The backups are what take our space, images we send are usually smaller in size so likely within a TB or 2 off data per year so we can downgrade massively ponce we have those local backups
- I already ordered a 36 Bay Supermicro box off ebay. SAS 6gps rails, with motherboard, cpu's and ram. Ready to go for a Truenas System. Got it for $515.00. Has 8 pcie 3.0 x8 slots. Plenty for a dual 10gb sfp+ and 10gb rj45 card and can use the rest of the slots for HBA's ( If needed )
trafficjamstudio There is a trend of companies starting to migrate from Cloud back to local. For hundreds of terabytes people like us should be checking out Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Backblaze, Wasabi, IBM, Seagate Lyve Cloud, etc etc.
- I doubt storing that kind of data in the cloud will be viable in the current market. Most people are not willing in to put out the kind of money they are looking for at the moment. I've been recommending co-location setups for all my customers. Best of both worlds, a stable price and a stable storage solution that they can scale as needed with a fixed price.
- I've thought about co-location, but I'm rural and there probably isn't any place, distance wise, within reason. Because if you want to upgrade your storage box, fix it etc...you gotta drive to the location. Do you suggest any national providers that are decent in price?
cgi_ltd It all depends how frequently you're accessing the data. For example, 600TB in cold archive would be $600 per month, $7200 per year. But then if you needed to recover all 600TB that would be very expensive. How many TB would you say you need immediate access to?
I can't say there is a national provider, I generally take a look at what is closest to the client and go from there. That being said, most datacenters offer some kind of intervention service if it is an emergency. This could be useful if your drive to the datacenter is a bit much, just depends on what your time is worth. 😄
I tend to ask a couple of simple questions up front:
- Do they offer hardware installation services, if so, what is the cost and do they allow to have hardware shipped to their location for them to install.
- What is their SLA for interventions as well as cost.
- What are their access hours for on premises visits.
This should give you a good idea of what you're in for and if you cannot get out there, what your options are. Most places I work with will allow me to have parts shipped to them and they will install them for a very small fee, well below what I would charge to drive to said location and install it. Pair this with IP based KVM and you should be able to do just about anything without going to the datacenter.
cgi_ltd Even those prices are a bit high for my liking, glacier type storage is an option, but when you take into consideration that take out/egress pricing, it is a ripoff.
For the record, I received this email from Dropbox :
" In order to continue providing all Dropbox customers with a reliable storage experience and to keep pace with growing demand, we’re making some changes to our Dropbox Advanced plan.
Rest assured that there are no changes to your price for Dropbox Advanced, your service, or your data access.
Under our “as much space as you need” Advanced plan, we’ve found that a growing number of customers were buying Advanced subscriptions for non-business purposes. We’ve seen a surge of this behavior in recent months in the wake of other services making similar storage policy changes. We’ve observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers. As a result, we’re sunsetting the “as much space as you need” policy and transitioning to a metered model. We’re committed to making the transition as seamless as possible for our customers and ensuring they have the solutions they need to do their best work on Dropbox.
What’s happeningYour Dropbox Advanced plan will transition on November 27, 2023.
Your price for Advanced will not change, and there are no changes to your service or data access.
Under our Advanced plan’s updated storage policy, three active licenses will receive 15TB of storage space shared by the team—enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos or 7500 hours of HD video. Each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage, up to 1,000TB.
When your team transitions to this new plan, your account will likely be over quota.
What you need to doBefore November 20, 2023, please book a personalized session with our team [here] so that we can discuss your plan options. The scheduling link is also available in your [Dropbox account].
Thank you,The Dropbox team"
So, it seems they don't even wait for the end of our subscription. Since I won't pay more, I guess we'll be unable to upload more data from November 27th. I hope we'll have still access in read only....
I received a similar e-mail, however with my account in the several tb's range, I had no option to "book" an appointment to speak with them. It just said the transition is coming in November and nothing will change till Novemeber of 2024
We're over 200tb here...
Would love to know where everyone stands with their total storage and what they use it for.
We are a media company, so 150 TB is pretty solid actual usage. We shoot film in 6k and 12k and single projects usually run 10TB or more. We are constantly sharing data between clients, each other and needing access while traveling so DB Advanced was a perfect tool for our business for a number of years. We could trim that 150TB a little, but I dont feel like thats a crazy amount. Their calculations on 15TB being fine for tons of documents at 7500 hours of "video" is calculating it off HD video... not 4k or 6k like we (and the rest of the industry) has been shooting and delivering in for 8+ years. 15TB would hold all of about 20 hours of 6K video.... Come-On Dropbox. Dont make all of us suffer because a few users are using thousands of TB or PB of data with mining etc...
I have personally helped sign up dozens of people since dropbox launched and I was a first-year account holder, pretty bad way to treat long-term and VERY loyal customers who have built businesses around your products and have SIGNED CONTRACTS with you that you are choosing to not honor.
Anyone else in a similar boat?Everything is tough.
I'm not a long time Dropbox customer, in fact, I "migrated" from Google after their hard drive policy changed. Some of you may think, "Oh, it's people like you who joined that caused Dropbox to change its policy", but that's not true.
After Dropbox changed their policy so drastically, I was forced to lease a few storage servers and buy bandwidth to set up a storage cluster with an American company that I had been working with for a while.
Honestly, as tough as it was, there was still a way I could afford it - it was an outlay of almost $800 per month. But the biggest stress isn't even the money, it's the fact that you have to reconfigure a set of things, and face a lot of maintenance costs.
It was such an ugly solution, but I had to do it.
Dropbox's solution of adding users if you want more space is really too expensive, and it's several times more than my current solution.
I really don't know why Dropbox is doing this.clintwb How long have you been a member? Did you have a Business Services Agreement?
Member since 2009. One user for a lot of that time but as we grew we added users the past 4 or 5 years. Regardless, paying up front even a year at a time and then being told that what we paid for they will not give us anymore (less than half way through) is pretty messed up.
Our company has a hot storage pool of almost 300TB currently, we also have a cold storage pool of almost 600TB. Most of the people that we consult with have 100TB or more of storage. I have migrated all of them, including our business to either a colocation- or local-hosting type situation. Dropbox thinks very highly of their toolset and honestly it is just not worth it for us nor any of our customers. Perhaps some people find it useful and worth the investment, but not us.
I would highly encourage users to NOT look at Dropbox as an Enterprise service. Nor Google Drive, nor Box.com, nor any of the other ones like that. Frame.IO is launching a service soon that allows users to connect S3 storage. IBM, Azure, Google Cloud are all better fits for storage.
- S3 storage tends to be on the expensive side, when you consider the amount it costs just for the storage, not to mention any ingress or egress fees to pull/push data to them.
That's true it does, but situations like this are less likely to arise. Always the trade off: speed or cost or quality.
Don't bother, just host your own service and make your own s3 storage on it.
If you want some info on this let me know.
Yeah, lot of companies going back to on-prem. 45Drives has their Storinator as an option for people https://www.45drives.com/products/storinator-xl60-configurations.php
- Does that include drives? Didn't seem to note that it did. Though, maybe I can't see it on the mobile view. Looks like they need a web developer...
