We gently slipped PutPlace out of beta and into full paying proposition. So now you get 20GB for 30 days and then its time to crack open the credit card.
However if you signup using the promotion code betaguest you will get 20GB free from now until Christmas.
So knock yourself out for free!
Copacetic 
Well done, Joe. Here’s to a Christmas of many paying customers for both of us!
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Congratulations Joe!!
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Stephen and Eoghan many thanks
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Well done Joe.
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Well done Joe, very compeditive. You should do very well.
Tom
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Thanks Tom.
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Hey Joe
I’m not being confertational or taken a shot at you guys by this comment.
Those sort of antics are not in my nature, I really love to see a company coming out with something new and creative especially an Irish Company.
I love your company and the innovation your involved in. I read your blogs and visit your website quite often, so if this is out of place just remove it or if its asking any confidential company information feel free to say so.
The prices have me rubbing my head.
I believe your probally using S3 storage from amazon ?
If you where you would be buying at
$0.15 cents for storage of 1GB
$0.10 cents for uploading that 1GB
$0.15 cents for downloading that 1GB back.
All in all that 1GB has cost you $0.40 cents per GB.
Now based on your Gold plan, at ā¬100 a year, thats ā¬8.30 a month, for 80 GB so thats about 10 cent a gb your charging
Now taken into account you cant really over sell on a Gold Plan as the customer will simply downgrade, if they are not using the storage
How do you make money with the above costings?
Am i missing something.
Also feel free to tell me to fuck off, as if someone was probing my pricing i wouldnt want to give away my business strategies. š
Tom
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Hi Tom,
Yes we use S3.
Very few people actually download so you can practically eliminate that cost.
Most people don’t run right up to the bumper so as the number of users go up we tend to make savings across the bell curve of storage utilisation of our user base.
We also compress our content once it goes into backing storage and that generates another saving.
We are continually investigating ways to shave margins in these areas so we believe we are competitive.
I should also point out that their are economies in scale in the S3 pricing that kick in as the number of users go up.
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Well done guys, this is definitely a unique proposition from an Irish Company, and I can think of many sectors right away who would benefit it.
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Nice one. The beta has been stable for some time (I reckon it was more a marketing beta rather than an actual product beta as the product seemed perfect from the word go) so this was expected.
Is it going to be a home market base or do you intend going after commercial business? I have more than a passing interest in this as our foucus is soley commercial online backup and if that is your intended market we certainly can’t compete on price without radical changes in the way we do things.
So much so that I reckon many online backup companies may need to introduce an Amazon based aternative service for price sensitive clients.
I reckon there will be many different levels and types of remote data storage in time to come.
My guess is that PutPlace will be very successful in a niche market which they have studied well. The pricing structure can only help given the way the economy has gone.
Mark
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Hi Mark,
We are firmly focussed on the home user/travelling user marketing for personal data.
We get a reasonable number of enquiries about business backup. We point out on each occasion how PutPlace doesn’t do point in time backups, backup sets, live file backup or any kind of sensible database backup without the user taking significant steps to manage that process. If they still want us for business backup after that then we can hardly stop them signing up.
My own view of business backup is that the pricing is insanely high even with all the above features and I expect somebody to do something disruptive in this space in the next 12 months.
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Twelve months is a long time. “Something disruptive” is happening all the time! Anyone in the commercial online backup business will be used to and prepared for price drops. A common mistake is large sigular investment in radically depreciating hardware and software assets. I also believe that business users prefer a managed service which involves personal communication and involvement and prefer this at a price to rock bottom call on issue only prvider relationship. The home market however is definitely the price based market and for this reason you are unlikely to see much agressive competition from commercial online backup providers.
I think the real shakedown in the market will be when the web hosts enter the market. They may offer minimal cost per gig without the experience to realise that online backup clients come with significant support overhead and far greater responsibility than hosting clients do.
Mark
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In regards to commercial online backup business
There is a lot to be done, and a lot of revenue to be spent which nobody has done yet for the awareness of “online backup”in this country before we start a race to the bottom on pricing.
A lot of the managed hosting providers, wont have any interest in dealing with end users or the channel on this, as they have their hands full already trying to move storage space to their hosting clients (Servers), which is a much softer land.
Dont get me wrong they will try their hand at it, and maybe put a good proposition together in regards to price, but at the end of the day this type of business doesnt really work as a side line. This has all happened already in the US so its pretty easy to predict.
Eircom have had this product for some time, unfortently for us they didnt really throw that much money at it marketing wise, I dont think anyhow
The next couple of years really will be driving awareness for this technology by both marketing and getting out into the field and selling it.
Thats my feelings on it anyhow
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Just to give you some insight from the hosting365 perspective, we are a managed infrastructure provider – not a managed services provider. We decided quite some time ago that the route to success was through partners and enterprise customers who simply need the ‘kit’ (with related services). We actually provider power, space, servers storage and transit to many of the companies provising backup services to both home and commercial users, and we would rather focus on delivering the enterprise storage platforms, etc, at the right prices, than anything else.
As an example, our storage grid starts at 25c p/GB per month, and goes down as low as 10c p/GB per month, and there are no per file, per transaction, or inbound bandwidth charges at all.
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Very late comment on this one but just wondering how you decided to charge in Euro, rather than $USD ?
I’m not saying you’re wrong but i’ve found it to be a huge barrier for US customers to signup and was wondering how the decision was made?
Best of luck with everything – hope it’s going well
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