Google offers additional space, drops storage prices

While sending mails or uploading photographs, one is likely to use more space, and the new cut in price will surely help the users.

The storage cost ranges from an annual charge of $5 for 20GB, $20 for 80 GB, $50 for 200 GB, $100 for 400GB and $256 for 1TB(terabytes). This additional space will be in addition to already free quota that one gets between Gmail and Picasa Web accounts.

Twice the storage for a quarter of the old price
The company wrote in a blog post that today it is dramatically lowering the prices to make extra storage even more affordable.

Programmer Elvin Lee said in a blog, "You can now buy 20GB for only $5 a year--that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. Since most people have less than 10GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha."

"As always, extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and people who have extra storage will be automatically upgraded," he further said.

Even though Picasa is not a high-priority project for Google, it is still outstanding.

Cisco’s competition with Google
Google has started facing intense competition from Cisco Systems after Cisco recently announced its plans to offer a hosted e-mail service called the WebEx mail.

The WebEx mail will compete with Google docs and will be available from 2010 with a 5GB storage at $3.50 per user for each month.

"Standard Client package" includes Webmail client, Ironport, high availability, 5GB storage for Microsoft Outlook Client, a blackberry support ($1 per user per month) and ActiveSync for $5 per user each month.

Cisco also said it has plans to make additional storage options available.