If you haven’t been living under a rock you probably heard that Wuala recently changed a few things. The trading feature has been removed for good, if you want to get your precious online storage without paying, your only chance is mining bitcoins now – which you can use to pay for extended storage programs on Wuala.
That sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? The big feature that we all loved, the one feature that set Wuala apart from the rest, is gone. Booh hoo.
Let me tell you why Wuala is still the king of online storage: Pricing and the number of supported platforms.
No other hosted service gives you that much bang for your buck. For about 100€/year you get 100GB, that’s an incredibly good deal. If you believe Dropbox or an S3-based solution is cheaper you obviously need to check the prices again. Symform (no hard feelings, I love your service!) certainly looks attractive price-wise but falls short in the “team” or “group” aspect, thus making it a rather poor choice to compare against.
As for self-hosted solutions: If I already pay ~50-100€ per month for a (v)server and want to give my peer-group of 5 people access to 100GB of data, I better find a plan that comes with a flatrate for traffic – otherwise one month of self-hosting will cost me more than one year on Wuala. Even if I split the costs between my 5 peers, I’ll still end up with something more expensive.
Of course I’d love to see a more group-oriented, non-business plan that would allow me to donate space to my existing groups. I realize this is a big headache to implement – but it would be cool. 🙂
If you can name one service that runs on Windows, Linux, OSX, Android and iOS devices, integrates well into the big three’s file-systems, has social/group aspects, file-versioning, client-side encryption, intelligent caching and (soon) delta updates: Tell me, because I’d love to give that solution a go. 🙂
Wuala isn’t dead. At least not until the prices and platform availability of other products are on Wuala’s level. And let’s be honest: That will take a while.
I’m using the software since 2008 and still haven’t found a better way to share files with friends online. I tried Spideroak, Dropbox, Teamdrive, Ubuntu One and various other solutions I don’t even remember by name anymore and always came back to Wuala.
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