Rediff offers free unlimited storage

Email users the world over have never had it so good. The days of limited and paid email storage appear to be finally coming to an end. While Yahoo, Google, AOL and others have been offering their members paid unlimited email storage, Rediff.com today announced it will offer its users free unlimited storage space on Rediffmail with immediate effect.

This means that existing and new Rediffmail users need not worry about deleting messages and can download video or music files to their heart's content. Of course, the US-based mail2world.com and Korean email services provider DreamWiz are among the few that already offer free unlimited email. The business logic is simple. Hook the users with the unlimited storage carrot (since users seldom like to pay for email usage "" remember what happened to the VSNL paid email accounts), increase the hits on the website and demand more bang for the advertising buck.

Rediff.com, for instance, has about 50.66 million users (as of December 31, 2006) "" a 23 per cent increase over the corresponding period's figure last year. The company believes the number of hits on the site will increase substantially. Ajit Balakrishnan, chairman and founder, Rediff.com, said, "With the phenomenal growth of broadband penetration, usage for storage and sharing of multimedia files has increased. We have solved the problem of storage and capacity and hope that bandwidth availability will also follow."

"With this announcement, we are aiming to make Rediffmail as the preferred email for users rather than the second or the third choice," added Manish Agarwal, VP-marketing, Rediff.com. A few months ago, in order to attract consumers, it had announced Rediffmail Plus, a subscription-based service that offers a variety of premium features with 2GB of storage space. The free version users had 1GB of free storage space.

However, there's a cost attached to the plan. This means Rediff.com will need to have a storage and back-up infrastructure that will be capable of handling the increasing data. "We have been working on this for the last two years and have created a sturdy infrastructure and invested enough in servers and storage systems," adds Balakrishnan.

To provide continuous back-up (data redundancy) to users, Rediff.com portal has tied-up with service providers such as VSNL, Reliance, Sify, and Bharti. Each of these rooms, which is being rented out by Rediff.com, will have high-tech server racks and the requisite security systems. "Back-up will be done periodically either daily or weekly which will be again stored on discs and kept in some other area," said Balakrishnan. The technology is built using web services, self-managed storage control units and large distributed storage clusters.

While the management is not ready to discuss figures, a back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that it will require terabytes of storage capacity (costing crores of rupees) to make this happen.

And they have competition on hand. Google is already said to be testing a new storage service codenamed Gdrive or Platypus. Others are sure to follow suit soon.