The capacity of hard drives available for purchase to people today is measured in terabytes, and even more than one drive can be installed in a computer. But this still did not solve the problem of information storage.
Prehistory of the emergence of cloud services
Previously, no one could have imagined uploading large quantities of files to remote storages. Today, with the advent of high-speed fiber-optic Internet at fairly low prices and the possibility of creating high-quality media content and large software products, uploading them to the network has become simply necessary.
Computing power of computers is also falling in price with the constant release of technical innovations. A huge number of servers for large services such as Yandex or Google have become commonplace. They pioneered the discovery of cloud-based file storage services free of charge for all people.
Before that, file hosting services were in the lead for a long time, the most famous of them now are DepositFiles and LetitBit. You can upload any files to these sites, up to several gigabytes. Websites even pay for other people to download them. So for 1000 downloads you can get up to $ 50.
Free storage for everyone
Cloud services are represented by Google Drive, Yandex. Disk, Mail.ru-Files, Dropbox and other services. All of them are completely free and have only a limit on the total amount of downloaded files. The income of the systems depends on the quotas bought by users to expand the available space. By default, you can get from 50 to 100 GB of space for free.
Most of the services have programs for Windows, Mac and Linux to download files from your computer more conveniently. You can customize the access rights of other users to your files. After downloading the file, only you can download it, and in order for another person to download it, you need to set the rights for everyone who has the link. These services are convenient for storing text documents, videos and photo files.
Apple has taken a step further by creating an iCloud cloud service for all devices of the manufacturer, that is, having an iPad, iPhone and, for example, an Apple laptop, all the necessary files will be available on all devices.
Due to the emergence of such services from large companies on a free basis, opinions appeared that all information uploaded to them is checked by security officers of both the FSB and the FBI.
Therefore, each person can simply rent a server or hosting in any Internet company and use it only for storing files. They can be uploaded and downloaded via any FTP client. The average cost of such a 2-3 terabyte "hard disk" starts from $ 40-50 per month.
