Ask HN: why Baidu cloud can offer me 2To when I register and not Dropbox?
Since i live in china, I have started using more and more chinese app on my android. I have discovered Baidu Yun which has offered me 2To space when i have registered. I was quite septical by the functionalities that it could provide me but later, I have seen their (Android/iOS) app gives me even more functionalities than dropbox.<p>This offer didn't have any time limit and last week, Baidu Yun has given to me 3To more so now I have 5To.
Baidu is not the only one who provides this offer, also Tencent QQ cloud gives me 30To.<p>Sure the only problem is that you have to be able to read chinese. However, the UI/UX of those App is very clear and you can do basic action very easily. The chinese are probably overselling like crazy (not to say Dropbox don't), if a a few million chinese start filling up on those TBs they will run into trouble very quickly... but they know this won't really happen, so they just use this for marketing purposes.
/imho Baidu Yun allow you to download some files through bittorrent. You just have to upload your torrent file then it will be downloaded on their servers. I don't have a great connection at home but i can upload 6Go files from my computer with 1.5Mo/s or 2Mo/s to my BaiduYun personal storage, and i reach 3Mo/s per downloads. It's quite common in china to use BitTorrent, and most of my friends downloads more than 10Go per day. I agree that it must be about a marketing campaign but it's still incredible. I have already reach 1.5To, and i didn't have any email from them or warning. To oversimplify, either Dropbox is too greedy or they have grater costs per GB than the Chinese companies. Chinese companies maybe can have cheaper storage hardware but it couldn't be thousands times cheaper.