MediaMax Offers 25GB of free online
Free/fee sharing/backup service targets
consumers, professionals
by Daniel P. Dern (dern@pair.com)
Vendor: Streamload, Inc. Product Name: Mediamax free/fee online file sharing/storage Price (MSRP): 25GB free; 100GB for $4.95/month (larger amounts,
yearly discounts available) Availability: Now. Product URL: www.mediamax.com
Tech Requirements: Javascript/Java-enabled browser
A gigabyte or two of free online file sharing/storage space is easy to find these days — but for many consumers, professionals and SOHOs with blogs, podcasts, photos, and backups, that’s not enough. And paid space seems to run a minimum three to five dollars just for another gigabyte or three.
Streamload Technologies has upped the ante — and quota — with
their MediaMax.com service., offering 25GB storage (with a monthly
download cap, note) free.
And if you want or need more, you can get 100GB for $4.95/month,
250GB for $9.95/month, or 1TB for $29.95/month (about 20-25% less
if you pay by the year). One year for a quarter or full TB is about a
third of what you’d pay for RAIDed external storage in your home/office.
say, with a DLINK DNS-323 NAS or Infrant ReadyNAS+
And data is stored on multiple disks, in multiple locations, so you shouldn’t lose files from a single failure.
According to Michael Corrales, Director of Marketing at Streamload, Inc., the company behind MediaMax, they can afford to do this through a combination of special storage technologies, bulk purchasing of storage — way cheaper than you or I will get buying 750GB drives at New Egg, I’m sure —
MediaMax is targeting both the media-sharing — you can give non-members access to your files — and storage/backup customers; according to Corrales, about half or more of their customers are sharing files, and nearly half are using it for backup. They offer a number of applications to help with photo and video sharing.
To use MediaMax, you need a browser running JavaScript 1.5 or higher… although features like batch-uploading requires an embedded Java
install.
For power users, Streamload also offers a client tool for XP, and supports
FTP up/downloads — probably worth checking out, as the browser upload I just tried was slowwwww, AND bogged my system down.