MozyHome Increases Pricing, Drops Unlimited Storage
Decho has announced new pricing for their well-known MozyHome backup service. Previously, MozyHome offered unlimited online storage for backups from a single computer for $4.95 per month. Under the new plans, users can choose between 50 GB of storage for backups from a single computer for $5.99 per month, or 125 GB of storage that can be shared by up to three computers for $9.99 per month. With either plan, additional computers, and additional 20 GB storage blocks, cost $2 each per month.
Mozy’s announcement cites rapidly increasing storage needs (for example, high-definition video clips from iPhones) as the impetus for the change, while at the same time insisting that most of their individual users require no more than 50 GB of online backup storage anyway. The company also points out that for users with three or more computers, each of which has only a modest amount of data to back up, the new pricing could actually lower their costs.
However, for most customers, Decho’s carefully crafted explanations are likely to ring hollow, as the bottom line will be that from now on, MozyHome costs more for less. Competing services wasted no time in exploiting this fact to attract those customers who will inevitably be tempted to switch. For example, Backblaze offers a 10 percent discount to switchers who use the coupon “byemozy,” while CrashPlan offers a 15 percent discount to Mozy switchers. Both Backblaze and CrashPlan continue to offer unlimited storage at costs lower than MozyHome’s new pricing—even without the special discounts.
The revised MozyHome pricing goes into effect immediately for new customers. Existing MozyHome subscribers continue to receive unlimited storage they’ve already paid for, but will see the new prices take effect on renewals beginning 1 March 2011.
www.willemijns.com/backup.htm list all of their competitors ;)
I can see Mozy changing the rules for new customers but to make people that have spend months uploading pay more at this time is not very fair. They think that others will follow, however I can tell you that onlinestoragesolution.com will never do this to current users. Even if we change things for new customers when we make a deal it's a deal.
We've been using Backblaze happily for 2 years after being severely disappointed with Mozy, and we couldn't be happier with Backblaze. Backblaze is the best. This is even more proof that we made the right choice when choosing Backblaze.
Mozy can kiss my a$$...I've been using them for years and this is how they repay my loyalty? I'm switching to Backblaze today.
Hope you'll check out CrashPlan too. 15% discount for Mozy refugees. www.crashplan.com/mozyonover
I first read about this change here. I'm a Mozy customer and didn't even get an email. I have now cancelled my account. The pricing for my storage needs was out of line. The change without notice was unacceptable. I have spread the word to friends to drop them and am no longer recommending as a backup choice.
Yowch. Looks like I'll soon be paying more per month than I currently pay per year if I stick with Mozy. Thing is, shopping around with online backup is extremely expensive in terms of time -- it took me months to work out that Carbonite wasn't going to get my backups done. And presumably, if I want to keep my data safe with Mozy in the meantime, I'll be paying their ransom to keep my existing bacckup around...
Carbonite, like a Mac, just works. YMMV but I’ll stick with a superior back up service and better price to boot!
When I learned about this, especially the way Mozy was talking about customers, I asked for a refund and happily signed up for Crashplan. I still had a year on my unlimited plan, but Mozy made it clear that they thought I, and others like me, were taking advantage of them. Apparently, they didn't understand what "unlimited" meant.
I've wasted a year uploading data to Mozy - to say that I'm annoyed would be an understatement [and think of the wasted electricity from running a MacPro day/night for a year too].
I'll admit that I thought they were daft offering 'unlimited' storage for $4.99, and suspect I am one of many who would have been prepared to pay rather more than that for large amounts of online storage space. Unfortunately for them, their revised pricing means it is cheaper for me to buy storage directly from S3 @ Amazon than it is to pay Mozy.
It's also much cheaper to buy additional hardware and to create off-site backups than to pay them: and the restore would be much quicker too.
I tried Mozy a long time ago and found that half of my restored files were corrupted. I gave up, moved to CrashPlan... which while the GUI is a little Java-clunky, has been 100% faithful in bringing back files (mainly accidentally deleted or badly changed files -- the multiversioning / deleted file retention is invaluable!)
I STRONGLY recommend Crashplan, the prices are good, the flexibility is great, the support is ... dedicated.