Cloud file storage is one of the hottest trends in the IT industry today. Clouds provide users with a lot of advantages: from saving space on their devices’ hard drives to ensuring data security – even if something happens to the user’s device, their data will not be affected and they will retain access to it.
Today, there are many cloud storage services available on the market. However, we recommend using only decentralized cloud services. Why? It’s simple: in decentralized networks, there is no person who could benefit from selling user data. Unfortunately, this is not uncommon in decentralized cloud storage, and we are not even talking about top management – it is enough for cyber criminals to negotiate with one of the clerks.
But which decentralized data storage service to choose? We have prepared a list of the 5 best services – each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, so choose the most suitable one for you.
Sia
Sia is one of the oldest decentralized data storage projects, launched in 2015, and one of the largest, both in terms of the volume of stored data and in terms of market capitalization.
Among the success factors of Sia, first of all, is its cheapness – storing 1 terabyte will cost about $2 per month. In addition, since Sia was among the pioneers of the industry, the service managed to gain a loyal fan base and enjoys a reputation as “time-tested”.
However, Sia also has problems, and primarily technical ones – access to user data is unstable, which seriously limits the value of the project. And, unfortunately, technical problems remain unfixed for many years.
Utopia
The Utopia project is often mentioned among secure cloud data storage services, but this is not entirely true. This platform really offers reliable data encryption and a number of decentralized solutions to protect privacy, including a proprietary DNS service. However, there is no cloud storage in the service.
User data in Utopia is stored in so-called “Encrypted Containers” (encrypted disk segments) directly on the users’ devices.
So if you only need data protection with encryption, Utopia will be a great solution, but if you need a cloud, Utopia is not for you.
Storj
From the point of view of file storage, Storj provides a really high-quality service. User files are protected by reliable end-to-end encryption, ensuring that only the owner of the file will have access to the file. Moreover, there is no complete copy of the file on any of the nodes, so only its owner can even “assemble” the file. And all this is complemented by a high speed access to files.
The main disadvantage of Storj is the payment mechanics. You must pay for storage in Storj coins. This is a highly speculative coin, the price of which can change significantly in a short time. For example, at the end of February this year, Storj soared from $0.50 to $3 in just a week, and then almost as quickly the price fell back. It is quite upsetting to find out that file storage has become six times more expensive in a week, isn’t it?
Filecoin
Filecoin is the ”heavyweight” of the industry, formally working since 2014, which was created with the participation of the biggest names in the crypto world, and the capitalization of the FIL coin exceeds $6.5 billion. So this service has already become “too big to fail”.
At the same time, there are serious problems with the Filecoin mainnet – the mainnet was launched only this year, and immediately faced regular outages. They are mainly caused by the ”difficult” relations of the project with its miners, who are dissatisfied with low rewards.
StorX
StorX is a young project on the market of decentralized cloud data storage, but just in a few weeks, the service has already gained more than 100 thousand users, and almost 3000+ nodes work in its ecosystem within 2 months of launch. Additionally the $SRX token price went up in a few minutes after listing with the starting price of 0.1 USD and maintains the continued ATH with 2.49 USD at the time of writing this article.
This success is primarily due to the fact that StorX was able to take advantage of the experience of its predecessors and correct their main shortcomings. User data is encrypted and distributed across a variety of nodes, and a perfect network infrastructure provides fast access.
In addition, the price of the StorX coin does not suffer from sharp ups and downs, so the storage cost is predictable. And if you need to store only a small amount of data that you do not plan to access often, then the service has a totally free option for you.
However, we must remember that StorX is a relatively new service, so it is impossible to predict its further development and future performance yet.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.
