Rediff offers free unlimited storage
Email users the world over have never had it so good.
The days of limited and paid email storage appear to
be finally coming to an end. While Yahoo, Google,
AOL and others have been offering their members paid
unlimited email storage, Rediff.com today announced it
will offer its users free unlimited storage
space on Rediffmail with immediate effect.
This means that existing and new Rediffmail users need
not worry about deleting messages and can download
video or music files to their hearts content.
Of course, the US-based mail2world.com and Korean
email services provider DreamWiz are among the few
that already offer free unlimited email. The business
logic is simple. Hook the users with the unlimited
storage carrot (since users seldom like to pay for
email usage - remember what happened to the VSNL
paid email accounts), increase the hits on the website
and demand more bang for the advertising buck.
Rediff.com, for instance, has about 50.66 million
users (as of December 31, 2006) - a 23 per cent
increase over the corresponding periods figure last
year.
The company believes the number of hits on the site
will increase substantially. Ajit Balakrishnan,
chairman and founder, Rediff.com, said, With the
phenomenal
growth of broadband penetration, usage for storage and
sharing of multimedia files has increased. We have
solved the problem of storage and capacity and
hope that bandwidth availability will also follow.
With this announcement, we are aiming to make
Rediffmail as the preferred email for users rather
than the second or the third choice, added Manish
Agarwal,
VP-marketing, Rediff.com. A few months ago, in order
to attract consumers, it had announced Rediffmail
Plus, a subscription-based service that offers a
variety of premium features with 2GB of storage space.
The free version users had 1GB of free storage space.
However, theres a cost attached to the plan. This
means Rediff.com will need to have a storage and
back-up infrastructure that will be capable of
handling
the increasing data. We have been working on this for
the last two years and have created a sturdy
infrastructure and invested enough in servers and
storage
systems, adds Balakrishnan.
To provide continuous back-up (data redundancy) to
users, Rediff.com portal has tied-up with service
providers such as VSNL, Reliance, Sify, and Bharti.
Each of these rooms, which is being rented out by
Rediff.com, will have high-tech server racks and the
requisite security systems. Back-up will be done
periodically either daily or weekly which will be
again stored on discs and kept in some other area,
said Balakrishnan. The technology is built using
web services, self-managed storage control units and
large distributed storage clusters.
While the management is not ready to discuss figures,
a back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that it
will require terabytes of storage capacity (costing
crores of rupees) to make this happen.
And they have competition on hand. Google is already
said to be testing a new storage service codenamed
Gdrive or Platypus. Others are sure to follow suit
soon.
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