Filedropper retracts offer of free 250Gb lifetime accounts due to demand
You may have come across this story on any number of news sites, Filedropper, a new file sharing service was offering free lifetime subscriptions to its 250Gb accounts to anyone who signed up before May 15; or rather, it was. Go over to the subscription page today and the offer is nowhere to be found. My guess is that demand was so high that it doesn’t want to have so many users with free accounts.
I’m not going to complain over a free lifetime account but there are a few things worth noting. That 250Gb is "gigabit" not "gigabyte" which translates to about 32GB as in "gigabytes" worth of storage and file uploads are limited to 5GB. Some sites were advertising the storage as "250GB" – either intentionally or through sheer ignorance.
The "lifetime" may be a little misleading because it says my account subscription is set to expire on Jan. 18, 2038. Why then? Why not April 27, 2038 to make things even? What’s going to happen on Jan. 18, 2038, maybe they know something I don’t? Maybe that’s the end of the world and I won’t need to store any files after that point?
It could be argued that it didn’t deliver on its promise and this was a kind of "bait and switch" tactic but it’s a free account so there isn’t much room to complain. Whenever something looks too good to be true, it probably is and it stands true; I’m glad to know that my beliefs have not been shaken.
As of late night yesterday (04/27/2008) the site was still accepting free subscriptions but as of this morning it is no longer taking them. After news spread my guess is the owners decided to retract the offer because it became so popular.
In at least a few cases the account was signed up for but the people did not receive the account confirmation and the subscription was not processed.
But, the paid services are pretty cheap. Plans start at just $0.99 per month for 5GB of storage and go all the way to 250GB of storage for $10 per month. Though there is still a little question rattling around in my head as to whether the owners actually mean "GB" or "Gb" and understand the difference between the two terms.
Using that line of reasoning, $0.99 for 5GB and if the GB is actually Gb that would be about 600MB of storage and $0.99 for 600MB I can actually see because $0.99 for 5GB is almost too good to be true. At least Adrive is able to deliver on its promise of 50GB of completely free storage. Goodbye Filedropper, nice try but try harder next time, if there is a next time.
Another service, MyBloop, claims to offer free, unlimited storage, I kid you not.
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April 28th, 2008
I was wondering what was going on because today I was trying to link a friend to this offer.
However the claim that the 250Gb was really 32GB is not true. To test this, I uploaded a random image file (which ended up being 3mb), and it told me that I had 3Mb of 250Gb filled. Honestly the rest of the word uses bytes, not bits, to measure data, so whether the ‘b’ is uppercase or lowercase really doesn’t matter.
April 29th, 2008
Actually i’ve been using mybloop for about 2 years now. theyve been in service for a long time and they have something like 1 million + files now.
lot of my friends use it to. pretty stable
April 29th, 2008
The date of the 2038 bug is the following day, Jan 19, 2038. Perhaps the subscription lasts until the 18th because of that?
April 30th, 2008
The reason the date ends on january 18th 2038 is due to the fact that all 32 bit unix based computers will experience a form of y2k on january 19th 2038 because unix computers store time in a 32bit signed interger representing the number of seconds since january 1st 1970, which will run out of space on january 19th 2038. Theres a number of debates on how to fix this problem, but dont fear! 64 bit operating systems are immune to this since time will be stored in a 64 bit signed interger.
September 16th, 2008
I still think sharenload and mailbigfile are the top contenders when it comes to “big file senders.” i give them a week before they flop.
December 23rd, 2008
Just so you know, these Special 250GB Premium “Lifetime” Accounts are still available here: http://www.FileDropperAccounts.com
I bought two yesterday and both accounts say they’re paid until 2038 and I haven’t had any problems with them. It’s a lot cheaper than paying the monthly subscription fee (unless you only need to host or store files for a month).
Anyone still wanting one of these Lifetime Accounts should check it out because I couldn’t find them anywhere else and had missed the promotional period.
January 26th, 2009
It looks like the premium accounts are also available at http://www.onlinestorageaccounts.com/ Looks like this guy picked up 100 of them and is trying to resell them.
June 25th, 2009
When i saw this offer, i made around 10 accounts. :]
Now i really have 250 GB
November 3rd, 2010
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November 3rd, 2010
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November 3rd, 2010
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November 3rd, 2010
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