Google Cuts Prices for Extra Storage

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I am not sure if many of you have known this, but Google has been offering additional storage for Gmail and Picasa Web users for some time now. If you had been wanting to upgrade but found it too expensive, here’s great news. This morning, Google not only bumped up the maximum disk usage that users could buy, but also reduced the prices.

Currently, free users have around 8 GB storage for themselves, out of which 7 GB is reserved for Gmail messages only and 1 GB for Picasa Web Albums. You could store your photos and videos in here. Photos posted to blogger too are included in the latter 1GB storage.

From official announcement

While storage costs have been dropping naturally, we’ve also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce costs even further. Today, we’re dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. And if you need more than 20 GB, you can purchase up to 16 terabytes!

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In the last few years, the very needs of users have drastically changed and technology has advanced at a great pace too. It’s easier to communicate and stay in touch with loved ones no matter how far they are spatially. For instance, Photo sharing with my friends and family had never been easier since I started using Picasa. I just upload it once using my desktop software and all my folks and view them online or even download it for offline viewing using the same app.

So the people at Google do realize our need for cloud storage, also taking advantage of the vastly decreasing cost of storage systems, have reduced the cost of extra storage. You could, such as, buy 20 GB storage for $5 a year, which is one-fourth the previous price and double the storage. This storage will be shared both with Gmail and Picasa.

Comparing Google’s new plans to other popular services, it seems a good deal. Dropbox offers 50 GB for $120 a year, while Google gives you 80 GB for $20. However, on the contrary, Google doesn’t give you file sync abilities that Dropbox does. We can only hope for GDrive to arrive soon.

So if you’re Google storage is reaching its limits head over to google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage to check out the new plans available for you.

Also, let us know if you use Picasa Web Albums or any similar service for sharing your photos with friends and family? How many of you actually practice the habit of storing your photos “in the cloud”?