Microsoft on Monday announced that it will be eliminating its top-tier cloud storage plan and offering unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers at no additional cost. The change will begin rolling out today for Office 365 Home, Personal and University customers and will continue over the coming months.
Microsoft has added a new landing page where you can sign in and add yourself to the list to be one of the first to receive unlimited cloud storage. Business customers will have to wait until at least next year to gain access to unlimited cloud storage, however, as this change only affects the consumer-facing version of OneDrive at this point.
Per the OneDrive Blog:
For OneDrive for Business customers, unlimited storage will be listed on the Office 365 roadmap in the coming days and we will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes. In the meantime, get started using your 1 TB of storage today by backing up all those work files kicking around on your PC – with the knowledge that even more storage is on its way!
Office 365 starts at $6.99 per month and provides users with fully installed access to the Microsoft Office suite of applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. A subscription enables users to install the suite on one Mac or PC and one iPad or Windows-based tablet, and also includes 60 world minutes on Skype.
As this change only affects Office 365 subscribers, it appears that Microsoft will continue offering its existing storage plans of 15GB (free), 100GB ($1.99/month) and 200GB ($3.99/month) for OneDrive customers. Meanwhile, Office 365 subscribers that currently pay for the larger 1TB storage tier ($6.99/month) will soon gain unlimited storage.
This makes Microsoft OneDrive a very competitive option for cloud storage. iCloud storage tiers cost range between 20GB ($0.99/month) and 1TB ($19.99/month), while Google Drive offers storage tiers between 100GB ($1.99/month) and 30TB ($299.99/month). Dropbox Basic provides 2GB (free) and Dropbox Pro offers 1TB ($10.99/month).
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I don’t even like Microsoft, but this is a game changer in terms of Cloud Storage pricing. One has to think that the other companies will have to come down in pricing to match. Who would pay $20/month for 1TB vs $7/month for UNLIMITED?
OneDrive is really slow in Europe, unfortunately. Google Drive is a few milliseconds away from me in Stockholm and superfast. OneDrive seems to be on US datacenters, almost 200ms away – for me max 1 Mb/s download compared to 80Mb/s with Google.
What’s the file size limit?
Can one only store files with ‘an office extension’ like .doc .xls on this or can it function as people’s pr0n collection hub? Copyright material also ok? What about files with a (VBA) virus in them? Nude celeb pics?
You can store anything you want (I think file sizes are limited to 10gb, so no blu-ray ISOs). It works exactly like Dropbox. There probably is some stuff in the terms about not storing illegal files, but it’s not like they check what you upload.
Who get better encryption is key to stop price war of cloud storage.