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Ondemand is our new cloud storage product. This is a pay as you go option to the more traditional fixed cloud storage plans. Now, Is this pay as you go product for you? Here in this article you will find the fundamentals to empower you to make a decision.

Ondemand Cloud Storage Highlights

First the product gives you freedom and flexibility to design your plan according to your needs. You will know “how” soon if you keep reading.
Second you pay for what you really use.
Then quantity of users, traffic and storage in your bill go independently from each other. This particular will be very flexible for many use cases with asymmetric consumption.
Third there are specifics that apply to all of our products:
- As our standard you will get resiliency and durability of data with point in time recovery backup. We have 3 copies of every file in 3 different data centers at all times.
- Too Web office, API , Client software access.
- Then admin panel for the organization and clear billing dashboard. As well as low latency and speed globally.
- Nimble VIP customer support as we do for all products and customers.
- Moreover lower standard prices for larger teams.
- More, much more!

Those are just some highlights about the Ondemand. Now, this post you will get a full illustration about the Great, the good the bad and the horrible about this new product. Moving on!

Users

As you will appreciate on the picture attached, your users will be billed monthly on fixed amount. Just so you know it will be per month per user according to price tiers. Meaning this product has many price tiers we design to make it very affordable on entry level as well as for organizations with many users or a LOT of users. In fact the more users you have the cheaper the users get. Now entry level is cheap and you also get 20 GB included traffic and storage. Then for the rest you pay as you go (Ondemand). Then for your benefit we will talk about Storage and Traffic respectively.

Users are billed like all other “older” products in NiHao Cloud.

Storage

As a matter of fact the bill will be the amount you have consumed over time along the month. Meaning that periodically the system will measure your storage, and calculate your monthly average consumption. Lets to an example thought exercise about this.

Let say you get the product with 4 users. This would be 8 USD for those 4 users every month plus the storage and traffic they consume. Let talk about traffic now. If those 4 users start exchanging using internal links. Just some office documents, they might work the whole month and not consume more than 20 GB in total. In which case the system will not bill anything.

Now, this is not most cases probably. If the users start using the system to store more data than 20 GB. Then the system will measure the storage every so often and record that measurement. E.g. today 15GB you store, tomorrow 55 and the next day 11GB. What the system does is to average those over 3 days and you pay that average. Notice it will not be the highest value.

How can your bill go crazy with storage?

Someone from your team would need to upload a LOT. When we say a lot we mean a LOT, remember this is by default unlimited. Now, you can set quotas per users to avoid this if desirable. That way gives you the flexibility of having unlimited. Then at the same time you can control on a user per user basis with quotas.
In case you set a limit for the account on purchase of afterwards in billing dashboard, your storage can NOT surpass said limit. Your bill for storage will never be higher than the limit you have set, but you would need to change it ti store more “things”. Let us move on to traffic now.

Traffic

Currently we are billing traffic on the basis of your uploads and downloads of the user(s) under your organization in the system.

For example, if you are have worries about the traffic bills, be careful with viral content and big files shares sent publicly. E.g.: a 2 GB video that you or your team shares in Facebook and then 20 000 people watch it, that is 40TB of traffic.

Given the above example, if you set a limit, this may cause critical service interruptions that will be inconvenient for you or your business. This means that if any of the user(s) on your plan shares or upload/download. Then the access to the files is many thousands of times a day, you may exceed the limit. Let say you exceed the limit.

What then?

We do not delete your files because of this reason.
If you or your team shares files and folders, they will not be publicly available anymore, the system will unpublish the shares.
The system removes all privileges of the users.
Your bill might be higher than the limit you set as the system runs periodically.

When this happens, you need to either increase the limit, remove the limit or wait until the end of the billing period to be able to use the system features again. Once the limit does not apply anymore, if you need to re-publish(share) the same files and folders. Then you will need to create new shared links manually or via API and send them again to the people who need them, etc.

Ondemand traffic too high!

As you may already know, in our system you can create public links. This is indeed a very useful function. People will be able to access those links by anyone who is given the link. For security they can not be scanned, but they are public. This means that if you make a big file public in social media or if someone malicious get’s hold of your public links, they can inflate your bill. In this case your bill might be very high.

Ondemand Product Afterword

Fists that system notifications and warnings will be sent to you via email about your usage and consumption as you configure it in your account. Now, we recommend you to check your billing dashboard frequently. This will help you monitor your team’s current consumption if you have worries about the bills.

Our recommendation of this product is if ether of the following is your case. Let say you do not know how much you really need to store en traffic. Second in case you have very asymmetric consumption patterns. For instance a website that serves a lot of content, but do not need to store a lot. Other case is when you have very low consumption or very high consumption.

Aside from the Ondemand product you can also use other FIXED price products. Finally here is a detailed description of all of our products.

Better to pay or enjoy the free versions?

Entrepreneurship practitioners and for people in general. In fact they know that today it is difficult for us to live without the services of technological giants. I am talking about Google, Dropbox or Amazon. Indeed their resources allow us to store documents and files and access them from any place or connected device.

However, as difficult to believe as this may seem, Google is not available to everyone in the entrepreneurship world. Many regions of the planet, like China, have their access to its technologies denied.

Even if those regions were not denied, many people don’t believe it’s a smart decision to trust our data. Specially to dubious information management policies.

Cloud services can be used by all kinds of users specially when we are talking about entrepreneurship. As you might have already observed, By default, many of these companies that offers these benefits will provide you with free and professional/premium versions. Now, if you have a professional project, are self-employed or have a small business, you can benefit from the paid version or Company for a small price.

To Pay or not to Pay?

The question is whether it is worth taking the leap and paying for a service that we can continue to use for free. Let’s see the differences between the two services. This is of course a very general level discussion and my own opinion.

The advantages

As in the personal versions, the Business version offers storage space to store documents and files. Thus, instead of saving that content on our local computers, we can have them on the Internet and thus retrieve them when we need them and from different devices. With this we will have automatic backups and easy access to our documentation.

Another example

The second advantage they might offer is the ability to edit documents from the browser. This is normally without installing office software such as the popular Microsoft Office or other alternatives. Among other documents, we can create spreadsheets, text documents, presentations, drawings, diagrams, forms and a long etc. Some companies might offer this for free, just think of it as an example.

In this way we will be saving paid software costs and its maintenance (Office). this is since the cloud storage tools work in the browser and through free mobile apps and do not require updates or configurations. As you might guess this is great from the entrepreneurship standpoint. More services together for less pay.

As it stands the entrepreneurship practiconers or business owner do not need to by 2 or 3 different software, get free the 3 or 4 free softwares and maintain the integration. Most things are the and usable from the get go. No need to pay IT personnel etc.

Also the customization level, we can comfortably manage access permissions to storage space, files, what permissions each account has, etc. In short, we can manage a virtual office from the same place. This for many tends to save money, be more reliable and easy to use. Not to mention the fact that you might have a good customer service support. To be fare this depends on the company, but you can evaluate what works for you.

Enterprise Edition for entrepreneurship

The charms of the Enterprise version extend beyond online storage and office suite. As some of them will also provide email management, text, audio and voice communications, as well as the organization of meetings and events. You will be able to host your websites in a simple and efficient way, and all this under the same platform.

On the other hand, when constituting a payment service, it will include advice and personal support via phone or email.

The costs of the Enterprise version vary depending on the users who are registered and the storage of each user. They will be adapted to the number of employees or work collaborators. These services normally have and the amount of storage we will need.

Nihao Cloud is an excellent alternative option to large corporations. As you might know it offers information security, speed and access from any corner of the planet. If you feel interested, you will find much more information on its official page.