Products; Flexible Cloud Storage
The products at Sesame Disk by Nihao Cloud have been improving continuously. This is of course to accommodate different your workloads and needs. In this post is we will explain them deeply, but if you think you might be interested Contact us and ask you questions and we will get back to your ASAP as we always do.
As you might already know we provide various services including Cloud File Sharing products which is our main focus. The objectives of the products you can get from us are flexibility and be the most affordable solution that can at the same time be very reliable. With that in mind, the products have ben evolving to fit different workloads that you might have. In other words the goal is to create products for real use cases team work, improve and innovate.
In general you will find 2 types of products, the new products which are metered, unlimited and pay as you go. To be clear you reserve a some amount of storage and traffic for which you pay fixed amount every month. Then if you happen to need more you can pay for it as per usage as you need without having to pay for space you will not use. This includes the products called “Freemium”, “Ondemand” & “Starter Plus”. Then our Legacy product left called “Business” which is predictable billing every month for who has that interest.
We have products for regular customers.
These products can be configured to fit a wide variety of cases. Aside we also have a few products for bigger enterprise customers who would prefer to receive customized services. Therefore the scope of this page is about our regular products that you can find on the pricing page. After reading this page you will have enough information about our services. Why they exist? Who they are intended to serve? The why behind the pricing schema. What is the roadmap for the different products? Finally you should be able to make your mind about if they are for you or not.
The customers who use our systems vary, but the most common goal of them is to work with remote colleagues, customers, teams. There is also a bit of everything; people serving website media content with our content distribution nodes, streamers, gaming tournaments video storage, other regular office document, some design companies love our versioning system, companies using our system for data back up, etc. Now, this for us is an honor and means we need to continue working harder to get better every day.
Overview of our products
Let us start by listing them. You can use the free product called “PERSONAL FREE”. This product is intended as a permanent free trial for you to know if the service is for you or not. Then you can also take advantage of our unlimited pay as you go product; we call it “ONDEMAND”. This is probably the most versatile product that we launched recently. Finally we have our a fixed price products called “BUSINESS” of 2TB storage fixed price.
Of course each of these products has advantages and disadvantages. For instance, fixed price products work for you if you need to have predictable billing every month. On the other hand it would probably NOT be great for someone who has 10GB consumption one month and the next 200TB. That is one of the reasons why we created the pay as you go product.
Now, let us go into the general details about our products and its corresponding descriptions and scenarios.
General Specifications that apply to all products.
On each product you can expect to find the following items and some extra perks as well.
Let’s use the “PERSONAL FREE” product as an example. As a matter of fact using the free product to explain is good because all other paid products have the same features and more. Feel free to check the picture next to the text or go to the pricing page.
Users
The free product has one user. By the same token each product gives you the users you purchase to share with your team. Meaning that you do not need to have any extra costs for users or space. Then afterwards buy what you need on the fly.
We are a company focused around collaborations. Therefore we created a system that allows you to grow with us and the more you get the cheaper the products get. This is of course proportionally to the resources available to you. For this we use Different tears and other items measurements like storage and traffic. Next you will be introduced to how the items mentioned in the pricing page work in general.
Cloud Storage
In the picture above when a user registers with a free user, they get assigned 2GB for FREE. This way you will use the system forever if wanted. It will allow you store those 2 GB for as long as you need them. The only condition on usage are that you should not abuse the account with too much traffic or other ilegal activities. Then when you become a paid customer, the system gives you what the plan promises. Meaning from those 2 GB to unlimited depending on your product.
Traffic for upload and download.
Every product has always had a different traffic share quota. This is from 10GB a month on the “PERSONAL FREE” product to unlimited on the “ONDEMAND” product. Meaning you and the users you purchase can use the traffic quota until it’s depleted. In fact the systems can be used and have been used in different ways. Therefore! introducing the next common item in the products list.
Products system access
The page says something like:
- Web, client & API access from everywhere
- No public shares with China Mainland
- Web office edition of docs, Excel, etc
*notice: This might change from product to product, but the general ideas is the same.
Our system is available for accessing from every country in the planet as of NOW, except for some public links blocked by some governments. Indeed this is the case of China. Long story short! We started providing services exclusively for China. All while we are not really a Chinese Cloud Storage provider. We know mainland’s network very well, some of us are experts in their “Intranet”. Then after about a year or two someone who works at the GFW did not like some links in our website.
In conclusion.
They blocked us and we had to become more creative. So we have a system that works in china, but the public links are still not accesible. The result of this is that if you want to share with Chinese mainland a multi-user plan is a requirement or you need to use the share with password feature in our system. This last feature creates a public share that requires a password to get to it. Lastly the system also allows you to access web office edition of docs, Excel, etc.
API for development
The system has a very powerful API that you can extend to interoperate with other software. In fact Feel free to read the API documentation, it applies to all of our products as well. Meaning it lets you get ride of the heavy lifting of files and storing things on a finite HDD or server, etc.
Have your own backup recovery system
The products say ~ “Point in time recovery backups via snapshots kept for 2 years”. What this means is that we do not delete files and that most changes are kept on the system. Except for deleted libraries. The libraries are the MAIN folders that appear in the root of the system when you login. You can think of Libraries as separate Hard Drives. Remember, If a library is deleted everything inside will be gone forever too.
In fact by default you can do point in time recovery any time before the end of the two years mark. Every file has a history of changes and every Library also does. This enables you to do point in time recovery.
History configs for point in time recovery
In our system you are able to configure full history if needed. Now, by default we have two years. If you happen to have a good reason to keep the full history then feel free to change it. People often also chose lower time or not to keep history when things are temporary or they already have a way of keeping the history. As example, in the ICT industry information generally the relevance is lost exponentially by days. In the other hand legal documents, Medical and other industries might want to keep things “forever”.
Finally notice, the system keeps 3 copies of the files in 3 different locations. This said, that might be not enough. Now, If you want to be 100% sure, just make a copy of everything every so often to other places or local disk. For most people once a month or once every two weeks it’s ok. Meaning the files that are in the system will not be lost easily. What having your copy allows is to protect you against human manual errors like elimination of libraries or “Acts of God”.
This is pretty much it about the generals of all the products. let us move on to specifics of each product.
The new pay as you go products
The Ondemand product launched as a pay as you go alternative to other cloud storage services out there. This means you just pay for what you consume plus a small premium per user license. In fact the pay as you go bills are for 3 items; number of users, average storage in GB in a month and total traffic in GB consumed in the month. To start with you get 20 GB of both storage and traffic included on the package purchase. This is for testing purposes and for lower consumption organizations and individuals. The launching of it has been this this year (2021). In fact we are still putting a lot of effort into making it much better cheaper. Check out this detailed description about the Ondemand pay as you go product if you need more information.
Product usage examples
This product launching was to fit the misfits like us Nihao Cloud. Let me elaborate! You might be on of the following examples or not, but they are just a sample show. Let see a School or teacher with 3 or 3000 students. If they can not pay a BIG premium to share some documents and collaborate effectively. Well This product has a low entry point and that is how it can help low consuming and low budget organizations.
A second example would be when you do not know how much you will consume. You can start with this product let say today. Then down the line determine if you need to change to another product or this is the most convenient.
The third and forth example is when you stream a LOT of data or have a big imbalance between storage and traffic. The streamer of a LOT benefits from the tears prices that go down as you consume. The organization with a big imbalance benefits because you
just pay for what you consume. This examples were put together, because often customers have both high consumption and imbalance as well.
Warning!
As a waning, this product can be very expensive if you share let say a 2GB movie and it goes viral in social media consuming many terabytes on traffic. Therefore you should be careful with this. Now, the product has some ways of helping you just consume what you need, warn. Feel free to ask for help if there are questions.
The “BUSINESS” Product
This product “BUSINESS” is part of our original products from very early in the company’s life. They have just gotten cheaper and better over time and will continue to do so.
The main features of these products.
It has FIXED storage and traffic, of course these are different sizes per product. Then the BUSINESS has 2TB of both storage and traffic. As most products have pricing tears as many other products. Meaning that the more you buy users of these, the cheaper the price per user gets. Since recently you also have the capacity to add/purchase space as needed. This enable these plans to become very elastic for larger organisations.
Conclusion
By now you should know what our products are about. That said do feel free to reach out for more information on any of them. The products will continue evolving. This changes will be to adapt to a changing market and become more and more competitive for our customers. We are here to help!