Hugedrive joins the cloud storage army

A company called Thirdrail Holdings has started to launch hugedrive.com for the general public, an online storage service for both consumers and businesses. The company said it would pose a huge challenge to technology giants such as Google and Amazon.

However, this is not the first time Thirdrail has entered the online market. Hugedrive through a number of vendors, has long entered the field, these companies include blogs (blogmas), e-mail (hugemail), network Hosting (Hugewire), network Monitoring (httpvision) and so on manufacturers.

Hugedrive offers three levels of service: free services, professional services, and enterprise-class services. Free service can provide 2 users with a total of 500MB of disk storage space, professional services can provide 10 users with a total of 10GB storage space, a monthly fee of 9.99 U.S. dollars, enterprise-class services each month to spend 29.99 dollars, can provide 1000 users with a total of 25GB of storage space.

The challenge for Hugedrive is to separate itself from the rest of the competition, which offers almost the same online storage services. "This is an extremely crowded area, and the competition in this field is fierce," said Greg Schulz, founder of the Storageio analytics consultancy. In this field, there are already google,amazon,hp,dell,ibm and at&t such industry giants. Even some banks are already involved in the field, such as Wells Fargo has started providing a management storage service. ”

Adam Trading, president of Thirdrail Holdings, said that Hugedrive would be a different product because it provided users with a simple and very easy to use network interface. "Even your old grandmother can use this product," he says. He also said that all applications are operated through a Web browser and do not require additional special software installation.

Trading says Hugedrive is a powerful attraction for corporate users as an online document management service. Because Hugedrive can provide enterprise-class file management, file recovery, and file versioning. He added, "whether it's a personal business, a small office or a large office, you can add or remove a list of people who have permission to access files, create usernames and passwords, or you can make it easier for you to advertise the content to your customers or employees. ”

Trading also says another notable feature of the product is the "online file sharing Gadget", where users can place the gadget on a website or blog and use it as a file-allocation service. "You can save your content on the hugedrive and place the gadget on your Web page." In this way, you can distribute various documents and documents. We'll take care of everything. ”

However, potential business customers are wary of storing their data in a relatively unknown company after a series of problems with the recent online storage service. Analysts Schulz that companies do not "believe that a free or inexpensive service can provide reliable protection for their data." ”

For example, Amazon's S3 service had a eight-hour inaccessible situation one day in July, during which users were unable to access and invoke the data and files they stored on the server. There are some online storage services that have been canceled, making their customers helpless, while the data stored by these customers is placed aside. A service called the Linkup stopped service on August 8 this year, and customers complained that they could not access data that was stored using the service.

Hugedrive hosted the service on a server cluster in a data center in Albany, New York. The data center is connected to the Internet through multiple high-speed broadband access. "We've been doing this for years," Trading said. For three years, we have never had any anomalies. We have redundant standby servers to ensure we can quickly increase our storage capacity. ”

Still, Schulz says most companies are "unwilling to use free or inexpensive servers to keep their important data." ”