Ondemand is our new cloud storage subscription product, aside we have created a whole family of similar products that are metered. 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. The names of this family of products are; Freemium, Ondemand and StarterPlus, please see them in the prices page for reference.
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.
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