EMC changes Mozy pricing with little notice

EMC significantly changed the pricing of their Mozy Home backup service last week.  They eliminated their unlimited offering and replaced it with two metered offerings.  The first offering is $5.99 a month ($1 more than the previous unlimited offering) for 50 GB and one computer, or $9.99 a month for up to 3 computers and 125 GB of data.  Customers that go over their allotted number of gigabytes pay $2 per month for another 20 GB. 

This immediately set off a firestorm of complaints, over 900 of which (as of this writing) are shown here in this Mozy Community forum thread.

Is it “wrong” for EMC to do this?

EMC has to do what they have to do to make a profit.  Yes, those who are currently backing up terabytes of data to Mozy would have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to stay there, and that seems like a ridiculous price jump.  It also seems ridiculous to think that someone would store your TBs of data and expect to keep doing that for only $5/month!  So my first reaction to the news was that I wasn’t surprised by EMC’s actions.

The previous business model of Mozy is similar to several other “unlimited” business models.  Sell unlimited Internet access to thousands of people and hope that all of them don’t want to use it at once.  Sell hosted websites with unlimited bandwidth and hope that most customers don’t get anywhere close to using it.  The people in my office building have unlimited use of the water fountain, but we can’t all use it at the same time.  The “unlimited” concept works when you get the 80/20 rule right.  But sometimes you don’t, and things have to be adjusted.

I believe that Mozy’s new pricing is meant to drive the Terabyte customers away.  They couldn’t possibly be expecting for their terabyte customers to pay $200/month to store 2 TB when they could get the “same” for only $5/month.  There will be a mass exodus of those customers, which is exactly what I believe EMC wants.  Many will go to their competitors and others (based on the posts in the forum) will buy local USB drives and back up to those.

Should they have done it with so little notice?

This is where I think EMC went wrong. When I did my first Mozy backup, it took me months to upload my 300 GB to them.  (That same amount would now cost me roughly $30/month.)  They need to give their larger customers a whole lot more than a few weeks to move.  EMC is forcing these home users to either pay hundreds of dollars per month or cancel their account and have no backups while they upload to their next provider.  This, in my opinion, is very uncool and will earn EMC a lot of negative brand equity.

Was this a smart move on EMC’s part?

Short version: I don’t think so.

Only EMC will know when the dust settles, but I’m not sure they thought about the ramifications of forcing their larger customers to leave them.  People who have terabytes of data tend to be geeks like me.  (I’m a movie buff, and I now have over 6 TB of personal data at home.)  Geeks like me tend to have a bunch of people around us that ask us what we think.  EMC says that it’s 5% of the customers that are forcing them to change their prices.  Suppose each of the customers in that 5% have 10 friends they recommended Mozy to, and that these angry geeks now call everyone they recommended it to and tell them to move.  That 5% suddenly becomes 55%.  Their could be a serious snowball effect and a significant revenue hit for Mozy.

But then again, what do I know?  The company that everyone seems in a hurry to move to (Carbonite) actually lost several thousand customers’ data.  Instead of falling on their sword, they’re actually suing their storage array vendor as if it’s their fault!   Carbonite, a company whose entire purpose for existence is storing customer’s backups lost their backups.  And they’re trying to pass the buck to their storage array vendor!  Why would anyone store their backups there?  And people are choosing them over Backblaze or Crashplan because they’ve… been… around… longer… 

Like I said.  What do I know.

I still ultimately think this move (and the way it was executed) is not a smart one.


Written by W. Curtis Preston (@wcpreston), four-time O'Reilly author, and host of The Backup Wrap-up podcast. I am now the Technology Evangelist at Sullivan Strickler, which helps companies manage their legacy data

8 comments
  • Curtis, I agree with everything you say here. For more people, it’s not an issue. For those that it is an issue, they also happen to be the ones on Twitter and savvy enough to go onto the forum & complain. I also think the notice was too short. Luckily, I have a few months left in my current agreement with them.

    That being said, if you’re not just shopping on price, Mozy is still a great online backup service. Most households that need to backup 2 computers will find their $9.99 plan perfect for them.

    If you have TB’s of data, Carbonite isn’t really an option, as they throttle your upload speed after a certain point. I hear lots of people going to Crashplan, but I also heard Crashplan’s upload speeds slowed to a crawl last week (more on that in my blog post, Reaction to Mozy’s Backup Plan Changes)

    While still undecided, I’ll probably stick with Mozy when it’s time for me to renew.

  • Setting aside everything to do with the business viability of “unlimited” plans and the justifications in throttling/capping them, it simply came across to me how poorly Mozy handled a significant pricing transition for many longstanding customers (and, as you point out, ones highly saavy and influential online).

    My co-worker, a Mozy customer, found out about the changes via Twitter–given the vitrolic Tweets there, surely not the ideal first touch point for Mozy around the topic. He wasn’t one of those huge power users, but he canceled nonetheless with a bad taste in his mouth for the brand. I wonder how many customers like my coworker, who weren’t the data hogs Mozy was so intentionally pushing away, followed suit in their cancellation of the service given the bad press?

    You point out that in alienating the most Internet savvy/influential, Mozy created a disproportionate stink online relative to the actual number of customers negatively affected. That’s Geek power in full effect. In reading your post, it occurred to me that a significant portion of those power-user Geeks are probably also the IT professionals to whom EMC sells enterprise products.

  • Mozy can change their pricing however they like but I do think that their new packages offer to little space for the price. They really should have gone about it differently. Perhaps leave the base price alone for the first package and bring in a quota of 250 gb. This would have kept them competitive in the market. As it is they now offer to small of plans for too much money. I think they forgot that there are still competitors out there.

  • I backup about 80GB worth of family movies and pictures. My rate is now over $109 w/ Mozy…needless to say I canceled my account before it renewed and now a customer of crash plan.

  • One more thing Curtis, I also told my fellow co-workers about the price hike and even though they’re not TB data hogs (like me) they will also be canceling their accounts. I really think you hit the nail on the head.

  • As a professional web designer the online backup is a must have security blanket. You hit the nail on the head regarding the timing or lack thereof. I am currently working with 1/3 the bandwidth as I max throttle an upload to my new provider LiveDrive. That company smartly created a “MOZY deal” for disaffected customers like me. I looked at Carbonite but found numerous complaints of throttling and the lost data as you noted. None of these services are perfect but there is always that one time you will need them (and I did use Mozy one time after a system failure)

  • I was also using Mozy, after they hiked up their prices I canceled my account and started looking for an alternative, I was going to choose Carbonite but I can’t trust them now as they lost their customers data. I did a lot of research and I am currently using Timeline Cloud I feel safer knowing that my data are backed up on Amazon S3 storage and it’s affordable.

  • mozy sucks – stay away.
    they lost all my files after 6 years with them.

    they took my money and delivered nothing.

    then they spit in my face saying it was my fault for running an outdated version of THEIR software. Why is it my fault for their failure to do the ONLY thing I asked of them?

    STAY AWAY – MOZY SUCKS – I AM NOT ALONE: MOZYSUCKS.COM BLOG – DO NOT GET SUCKERED IN BY THESE OTHER FAKE REVIEWS!