Cloudy skies
I signed up to an unlimited plan with Zip Cloud just over 18 months ago. I worked out with my amount of photographs and music combined (my total storage around 800GB), I would need to spend a fortune with Dropbox or anyone else for a similar plan.
My first problem is even though I pay by direct debit on a monthly basis, Zip Cloud is unable to recognise this. Every month without fail on the 14th (the day I started with them), it tells me I am out of storage and need to upgrade. This means I have the usual to-and-fro email conversations with their support team until someone realises I paid a month in advance a few days before. They then do manually what should be automated. This has been an annoyance, but I was prepared to put up with it.
The other annoyance is the continuous and confusing pop-ups, which ask you to buy different upgrades (faster speed – isn’t that the ISP? Or are you messing with us…
bigger file sizes… faster customer service – shouldn’t that be just some customer service?)
The final straw happened in the last 24 hours. I have slow rural broadband, plus I’m always adding to my photos, and I finally got up to date about a month or so back. However, yesterday, while uploading two photos from my iPhone, Zip Cloud told me I was out of space. I emailed them, only to get a response that said ‘Colin had exceeded Zip Cloud’s Fair Usage policy’, which in short says, ‘we’ve moved the goalposts, and in the small print “unlimited” actually means a given amount we can vary, when we feel we need more revenues in our business’.
I emailed them twice in response to the message, first to express my unhappiness, and second to question their business strategy (get the customers hooked and put prices up), which might have looked okay a year back, but with most of their competitors putting prices down and not raising them, I’d question their timing if not their strategy altogether. Either way, Zip Cloud’s policy seems to be to ignore the customer (again), and hope or assume they’ll get their credit card out.
Well, I’m not. I’m doing what I’d advise anyone else to do: dump them, and depending on the storage space required, go with someone else (for day-to-day stuff I always use Dropbox, who are fantastic, but too expensive for all my data). I’m taking my 800GB to Google Drive; with 1TB at £6 per month, they’re half the price of the “unlimited” Zip Cloud package, too. Vote with your wallets everyone, it will count in the end. Colin Flockton Matt Bolton says: Fair Usage policies are fairly common for ‘unlimited’ deals, but it’s very rare we hear of anyone falling foul of them. Zip Cloud’s is particularly unusual, though, because it uses an average figure to decide if usage is too high, instead of a single set number. We asked Zip Cloud about Colin’s case, and the company explained he had hit its current Fair Usage ceiling – something he couldn’t have known in advance. It said barely anyone hits this limit, but we pointed out using an average that’s invisible to users, and not having a set figure available on the site, makes things opaque for its customers. For those that hit the limit, Zip Cloud recommends its business accounts, which can be configured to offer much more storage – but for a steep increase in price, which isn’t likely to be suitable for most home users. The good news is Zip Cloud told us it’s refunding an extra three months of Colin’s account fees as a goodwill gesture.