Overall, these pricing differences are a reflection of the different nature of the two services: Jungle Disk notwithstanding, S3 is designed for commercial use by websites, while Dropbox is targetting individual users.

I should also add that in the months since I originally wrote this post, I have been using Dropbox more and more (and Jungle Disk less and less!). It is an excellent service.

Thats a good observation but you forgot the bandwidth cost that you would also spent if you would sign up directly with S3. As far as I can see dropbox also use S3 but does not charge clients for bandwidth.

/Henrik

I also got my hands on a 30% discount coupon from them, during the order process enter this coupon:NEOB-M5VL

* The exposure of data to the laws of other countries. The data stored with many of these services is presumably in US data centres and is almost certainly subject to US access laws. But of course there is no reason why the data has to be stored in the US (other than the current comparably low cost of bandwidth). It could easily be stored in any country, or even multiple jurisdictions at the same time with the rise in grid computing. Indeed it is likely the user will not even know the country the data is stored in. Probably doesn’t matter for your photos, but this should be considered. Naturally this point holds for most ‘cloud’ services.

* Isn’t it a shame that the co-location and other related services in Australia make it uneconomic for these types of business to operate out of AUS. It’s really holding back industry growth here.

* Even Australian residential and many cases business Internet plans make it difficult to use some of these services because of the monthly data volume caps. Presumably unless these ISP plans change the providers of services like this are going to have to do deals with the ISPs to have data through the services excluded from the caps to gain significant numbers of regular users.

It is nice having one service take care of both.

Food for thought…