Mozy ditches unlimited backup AND increases prices- time for mozy alternatives

Mozy sent out an email to (most) of their customers last night announcing they would be dropping their unlimited backup plan in favor of a tiered pricing plan. Mozy has offered their unlimited plan since 2006, so to be fair this isn't a bait and switch type scenario. And I can understand prices increase over time and they may need to adjust their pricing to stay in business. But I think they went about this the wrong way.

They claim that most of their users backup less then 50gb of data, so that is the new cap on the account. But to add insult to injury, they are going to charge you more for giving you less. I can understand if they want to get rid of those customers that are backing up 500+gb of data. But it seems like they want to get rid of some of the under 50gb data users as well. If it were me, I would not tell my customers "We are going to give you less now, AND we're going to charge you more for it as well".

Granted, it's only a dollar more per month. But it's a dollar more, AND getting less in exchange for that dollar. I think they should have at least kept the price the same. Or you can pay $10 a month for 125gb which will also let you back up 3 computers. Personally, if I am paying per gigabyte now, mozy should not be restricting me at all. I should be able to backup from as many sources as I want. If you want to back up additional computers, up to 5, it's an extra $2/month. Or it's $2/month for an extra 20gb of storage space.

So lets say someone is currently using 200gb of storage with mozy. Their monthly price would now go from $5/mo to either $22/mo or $14/mo if they upgrade to the 125gb/3pc plan.

I think 200gb is a moderate amount of use. For any users with a more extreme amount, say 500gb the cost becomes $48/mo under th 125gb/3pc plan. At that price point, you can BUY a 640gb hard drive. Why would anyone pay $50/mo when you can get a 640gb HD for less then the monthly price? Heck - you can get a terabyte drive for under $60.

It seems clear from their new pricing that mozy is actively trying to get rid of any users using more then say 200-250gb. I think they are also going to get rid of some of the users using under 50gb as well - they've gotten rid of me. There are still other online backup providers offering unlimited backups at the same price, or cheaper, then what mozy is now charging for the 50gb plan.

Carbonite offers unlimited backups for less then what mozy is charging for 50gb. 1 year of unlimited backup space will cost you $55. Mozy will cost you $66 for 50gb.

There's also backblaze which offers you unlimited backup for $5 a month per pc (or $4/mo if you pay for a year).

And there's crashplan which offers you 10gb for $2.50/mo down to $1.50/mo if you pay for 4 years.
But they also have 2 unlimited plans. The first one allows you to backup 1 pc and the price ranges from $5/mo down to $3/mo for a 4 year plan. Or you can get unlimited backups for up to 10 computers for prices between $12/mo down to $6/mo for the 4 year plan. A two year plan will come out costing $8.33/mo (or $3.75/mo for the single pc plan). And they are offering a 15% discount on all their plans right now for mozy customers

Livedrive also offers unlimited backups starting at $6.95/mo - price goes down if you sign up for a year. They do not throttle bandwidth and they support file versioning for up to 30 versions. They also support media streaming to the iphone and ipad.  Live drive offers some additional features, at additional pricing, which is aimed more at file sharing or file syncing. They give you a virtual briefcase which you can view through a browser or set up as a mapped drive on your pc. You can share files with other users or between multiple pc's. It also supports uploading files through an email attachment

And then we have Idrive, which while not unlimited, still offers what I consider to be much more reasonable data limts and prices then what mozy has decided to go with. For $5 (a dollar less then mozy) you get 150gb (3x what mozy gives) or for $15/mo you get 500gb of backup that you can use for up to 5 PCs. Plus they also do not automatically delete files and they work with external drives as well. A much better deal in my opinion then what mozy is offering now.

F-secure offers an unlimited backup option for 12 months for $49.99 which comes out to $4.16/mo. Although it looks like their online backup comes with the least features compared to any of the others. And it looks like you can only backup certain types of files.

Carbonite and backblaze both offer a 15 day trial. Crashplan has a 30 day trial and a money back guarantee. Or you can try their free version, which does not backup to their servers but does allow you to backup to any of your own external drives or even to the drives of friends and family with crashplan installed - a sort of cloud family backup solution. LiveDrive offers a 14 day trial. F-Secure comes with a 30 day trail.

Edit: Backblaze is now offering a 10% discount with the code 'byemozy'

Edit2: Happy to say crashplan seems to be working well at least as far as uploading goes. As far as I have seen, it has been uploading at the max speed that I have set it to and that my internet connection will support - around 2mbps. In about a day it has uploaded around 15gb of files.

Edit3: Well, looks like crashplan might have finally been flooded by mozy users. My upload speeds have been cut in half for the last 6 hours or so.

Edit4: Looks like crashplan flipped a switch somewhere. About an hour ago my uploads stopped completely for a few minutes, and then resumed but back at full speed again. So the slow down started at around 1pm and was corrected at around 11am the following day. Not too bad I guess.

If your prices suck, hide them - seems to be register.com's policy

One of the websites I host used register.com to register their domain name. I wanted to ask them to allow me to transfer their domain name over to my godaddy account because it makes things easier for me if everything is in one location. Plus if I have admin access to the domain name it makes things easier if I need to make any updates - I don't have to bother them to do it or try to figure out some other registrars processes.

I went to register.com to check to see what they charge per year for a domain name, only I couldn't find any price listing on their site for just domain registrations. I went into their help and searched on 'price' which did give me the link i wanted - only that link just redirected me back to their home page.

So I opened a chat session with one of their support reps. I'll post the entire chat conversation below, but the short version of it is that they say they don't post the pricing for domain registrations because they don't want to 'confuse' anyone by giving too much information. Apparently they don't have a problem displaying the pricing if you want to host a website with them. But for some reason, they think it'll be too confusing to have a single page that just tells you how much it'll cost to register a domain name. I wonder why they think it'll be 'confusing' to tell you they charge $37/year to register a .com name. I'm sure that they charge more then 3x what godaddy and many of the other registrars currently charges to register a .com domain name has nothing to do with them hiding - i mean simplifying their website. Those poor godaddy users - they must be all confused with a link right on the home page that lists all their domain registration pricing.

Even if their pricing were just a few dollars more then godaddy's, i still wouldn't use them. If a company can't post their prices, then they are hiding something and it's not worth doing business with someone like that in my opinion.

I've removed the name of the chat session agent since I'm not trying to get any single support rep in trouble, otherwise, the text is unchanged:

<Agent>.: Hi, my name is <Agent>.. How may I help you?
<Agent>.: Hello Ian. My name is <Agent>. I will be your Chat Representative. How are you today?
ian : Can you tell me where your pricing is for domain registration? i can't find a link on your home page and the link i found in your support section just takes me back to the home page.  http://www.register.com/about/pricing/general.rcmx
<Agent>.: I do apologize Ian, but our site does not have the pricing, because we offer several different packages, and discounts for services.
If you can let me know what you are looking for, I can certainly help you.
ian : I just want to know the pricing for registering a domain name - i'm not interested in any packages or other services, just registering domain names
<Agent>.: Is it a .com domain name? This would help determine the price as well.
ian : yes - you don't just have a listing of domain name registration pricing? But yes, right now i'm looking for .com
<Agent>.: No, unfortunately we do not have it listed online.
.Com domain names are $37.00/ year.
ian : i know this isn't your fault and I'm not trying to blame you - but i think it's a pretty crap thing to do not to display your prices. If your prices aren't good ($37/year is not good) then lower your prices. Hiding the prices just seems like a dirty business practice to me. Again - not trying to blame you I know it's not your decisions. Just maybe you can pass it along to someone. thanks for your help
<Agent>.: We do not "hide" our prices, but because we offer so many other services, and domain extensions, etc, we do not display them so that they are not confusing.
I appreciate your suggestion, and will pass it along.
ian : sorry but i disagree - you do hide them. what you just said is an excuse. i dont think it's confusing to just have a page which displays the price of registering a domain name. thanks anyhow

Thinking of doing business online? Don't use paypal

http://blog.apparentsoft.com/business/124/is-paypal-good-for-your-microisv-business-a-short-paypal-horror-story/

I've had this same experience with paypal several years ago. They closed my account because they thought some transactions violated their terms of use. They would not tell me which specific transactions. They gave me conflicting information when i called them. And they also sat on the money in my account for 180 days before they let me withdraw it. Which is basically their way of forcing you into giving them a 180 day interest free loan.

I will never use them ever again for any online business. And i try to avoid using them for paying for anything online when ever i can. I refuse to link any bank account to them and if I wind up with any money in my paypal account i always spend it as soon as i can.

You might want to read this site as well before considering paypal: http://www.paypalsucks.com/

Paypal is not worth doing business with. The guys from the above post were lucky that they had a 2nd account to use. Otherwise they most likely would have lost ALL of their sales due entirely to paypal's unprofessional behavior.

Star Trek

Sorry, but as a trek fan, i have to vent. (some spoilers if you care)

The new movie is a good scifi movie, but barely an ok trek movie. The plot though was just really stupid.

A giant mining ship from the future comes back and is able to destroy an entire fleet of ships, but the enterprise by itself was able to destroy an entire salvo of the same torpedoes that destroyed an entire fleet. And the main component of the ship, the drill, can be knocked out with a handgun. And no one on the entire planet of vulcan had a single ground based weapon to shoot that thing with? Hell they could have just flown a shuttle pod into it. And lets not forget we have a ship full of romulan MINERS, not soldiers. But somehow nero is able to convince them all that they should wait around 25 years in the past to get revenge on someone who tried to help them - instead of like, going back to romulus and warning everyone. Hell, they could have taken the red matter and destroyed the star that destroyed romulus. (i'll ignore for the moment that any star going super nova, even if it was close enough to somehow destroy the planet, would still take YEARS to get there) But no, lets run around blowing up planets instead of saving the people we're so upset over losing. Convenient that the romulan mining ship happens to look so evil as well, instead of looking like, i dont know, a mining ship.

And lets see, spock needs a single drop of that red stuff to destroy a star, but decides to take along 50 gallons of it - were there a lot of other stars he planned on snuffing out? And when was the last time spock willingly surrendered such a powerful weapon to the enemy? He would have swallowed the red stuff before handing it over.

And i have to say, the engineering section of the enterprise sucked. no fancy words, it just sucked. it looked like a sewer treatment plant, which isn't too far from the truth. They shot all those scene in a beer factory. Did anyone tell abrams that the enterprise runs on anti-matter and not steam power? I mean the bridge looks like a futuristic glamor studio but the engineering section looks like it was processing toilet flushes.

I'll ignore for now that kirk just happens to get marooned on the same planet as future spock AND scotty. And I'll ignore that they happen to also be located in the same area on the planet. And i'll ignore that they managed to beam themselves not only onto a ship at warp, but several light years away.

I cant ignore though that a fresh out of the academy cadet is promoted to first officer after he sneaks onto a ship he was never supposed to be on. I get that pike thinks kirk has potential, but frankly, that's bullshit. Seems a bit unrealistic to me that a 17 year old chekov is also serving on the bridge of the fleets flagship. So he entered starfleet academy when he was 14? And i call bullshit on kirk being promoted to captain of the enterprise the next day, even if he did save the earth.

And why exactly did vulcan need to be destroyed in this 'reboot' ? Do they actually have something interesting planned with that or was just it some random crap they included?

And what was the deal with spock and uhura? His mom dies and suddenly they are in love with each other? The characters themselves were ok. I think quinto did a good job as spock. I think pine did an ok job, although i think they tried to make kirk a little too over the top. Scotty was too goofy - did anyone actually watch any of the original cast? Uhura was ok. chekov was ok, sulu was ok. I think the best job was Urban as McCoy.

It felt like they tried to cram too much stuff into 2 hours. if they make 2 more movies (apparently they bought the rights to do so) maybe those will be a little better paced and have a somewhat realistic plot. I hope so - because maybe then it'll be a little bit more trek, and a little less 'reboot'.

is google becoming evil? they are breaking website keyword tracking

Googles moto says not to be evil. But a change to their search page is going to be very evil for a lot of web site owners.

Normally when someone searches on google and clicks a link in the search results, the website owner can determine what you searched for that brought you to their site. This is very useful since it makes it easy to figure out what people are interested in and can be extremely useful for websites that make money off of ads on their webpages. For example, if people who search for 'tires' come to my page a lot, then someone who sells tires would probably be more interested in buying ad space on that page then say someone who sells cookies (unless they are cookies shaped like tires ... mmmm...cookie tires). 

However, a new change google is starting to push out will break this. This means a LOT of web site owners who depend on this information are going to suddenly find it missing. This is information that is basically a web standard for all search engines.  The ability to track keywords is something that works with all the major search engines.

You can tell if this is happening the next time you do a search by looking at the url after you submit your search term.

If the url looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=dogs

Then when you click on one of the links in that search result, the website you go to will know you searched for 'dogs'.

However, if the url looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/#q=dogs

And you click one of the links, they wont know what you searched for.

Hopefully google will reconsider deploying this new change, because it's going to hurt a lot of websites out there.