 "Chinese cloud giants vie for attention by giving up to 10TB of free space")
Think the oodles of storage space being offered to you by your cloud storage service is a lot? Well, think again because certain Chinese tech giants are offering many times the space on their services, for free. Baidu, Tencent and Qihoo 360 are all trying to lure in users with free space not in gigabytes but in terabytes.
According to a report by The Next Web, while Baidu and Qihoo 360 were trying to court users by offering a whopping 1TB of free space, Tencent one-upped the game by pushing the free amount to 10TB.
Terabytes of data on offer (Image Credit: Getty Images)
Baidu and Qihoo are supposed to be traditional rivals who will be trying to better each other’s offers as far as letting out space goes. It isn’t exactly easy to accrue all of the 1TB of data on Baidu and Qihoo at once, though. The signing up process will take you through a bunch of cross-device registration processes in order to pile up the storage space. Signing up for Baidu is a little tricky as well, as you need to pay up a small amount on its in-house online payment platform in order to gain the 1TB space. You have to pay an equivalent of 1 Chinese Yuan (Rs 10 approx) in order to get access.
There’s a small process you need to follow in order to gain the humungous 10TB of space on Tencent as well. You will not end up getting the whole space together but you will keep getting top-ups as and when you use up space. So for example, when you’ve used up 0.5TB of space, your account will be pushed up to 2TB; once you hit 1.5TB you’ll get 3TB of space in your account and so on.
Of course there is always the fear of putting your data on a cloud that may not always guarantee your security, especially since it belongs to the country behind the Great Firewall. However, with the aftermath of NSA and government spying, one cannot be too trustworthy of US based websites either. It is still a risk, though, and you should be careful of what you share on these websites, despite the huge amounts of space being offered.
Intrigued by all things social, Nishtha will invariably tweet about you. When not tweeting or writing about the next viral video, you will hear her proclaiming her love to Metallica, James Hetfield, Opeth, Akerfeldt and all bands that go 'growl'. She also obsesses about ACP Pradyuman and South Park and you will always find her moving around with a book. Her focus is on all the happening stuff in the tech domain, and she won't hesitate to take a shot at some of the oddball devices that make their way to our labs.