Online Backup goes from £40 p.a. to £72 per month

Mirage150

I have today been notified that my online backup service with Monster Cloud that I took out last July for £40 a year will be increasing to £72 a month with immediate effect! I have asked their support desk whether this is a mistake as there is still 3 months of my original contract period left but they have said the increase will come into effect immediately.

This is tantamount to blackmail as it takes many days to upload data to a new provider so I have the choice of accepting the initial months fee while I upload data to a new provider or, if I don't pay, taking a risk of data loss whilst my data is re-uploaded.

I am shocked by this as Monster Cloud is one of very few UK based backup companies and I would have expected better. I should be interested to know if other have had similar experiences or whether there is any redress I might be able to seek. Thanks.

TheCyclingProgrammer

Firstly I'm fairly sure if you've paid a fixed fee for a year they can't just force a price increase on you within the term.

Even on a monthly term they can only increase by so much before they have to let you cancel.

So you should certainly be looking at a pro rata refund if you cancel or them to honour what you paid for.

But i wouldn't worry too much about the data loss risk while you upload to a new service as I'm sure the risk is low. Can you keep a physical backup somewhere else in the interim?

MokoOno

Yep, same here!

Got the email saying its going from £1.99/month to £36/month for the 1TB backup service. It just seemed like a scam, firstly lure people in with the lowest price and get them to put all there important data on your servers then hit them with an extortionate cost.

I cancelled via PayPal IMMEDIATELY as the email indicated that the changes were effective from today (14th). I emailed their support and said I was cancelling and told them I wasn't happy with their their short notice, high price, tactic. Their reply wasn't very convincing, they simply said they had brought their prices in-line with the industry. We're that true, I could understand it and actually I might have stayed with them.

For reference unlimited backup online is typically £60/year from the more reputable providers. It is NOT £432/year for 1TB.

I reckon they were hoping to hit all their remaining customers for at least £40 each, if you said only 10000 customers that's adds up, its likely more..That makes a nice retirement plan for someone before everyone realises and cancels.

Very disappointing and goes to show a UK company can be just as ruthless as any other. I agree this is a form of extortion, which is likely not entirely legal but by the time they've got your cash probably not worth the fight.

I am still researching alternatives, I'd be interested to hear what you find?

P.S. It occured to me for £72 for the ONE month you could buy a decent USB drive put everything on it and leave it at friends/family like an offsite backup. Then sort out an alternative in the meantime.

Ectophile

Internet companies often seem to be the most dishonest weasels, and hide behind contracts that allow them to change the terms on a whim.

My 1TB "cloud" is an external hard disk drive bought from a local computer store. They cost peanuts these days. When I'm finished backing up, the disk is unplugged and stored somewhere safe. If one disk isn't safe enough, buy two, and keep them separately.

Never leave the backup drive connected to your computer. If you get hit by a ransomware virus, it will encrypt all your backups as well.

SplanK

Ectophile wrote: »

Never leave the backup drive connected to your computer. If you get hit by a ransomware virus, it will encrypt all your backups as well.

Nor in the same location in case of damage to the property through fire.


This is why I have a server at my parents which I copy my data to over the internet.

Jillos

I got this email from Monster Cloud too. I've copied it here. I think this is disgraceful, and I just pray that all existing customers cancel their accounts. In my mind they have basically stolen £20 (and a hell of a lot of time) from me for setting up the account in the first place. I'm really angry, and absolutely hate it when companues get away with stuff like this. Is there anything we can do?

Dear Customer,

We hope you are enjoying the benefits of your Monster Cloud account.

Over the past few months we have made major improvements to our website, web portal and our software as well as a huge increase to our data warehouse infrastructure.

To ensure that our business continues to provide the excellent services you have come to depend on we have had to make some price increases to cover the costs of storing your data and providing data security for it.

From today onwards we are introducing a new pricing structure that will take into account the total volume of your Online Backup stored on our servers. In addition to the Online Backup account fees there will now be a monthly fee based on the total volume of your Online Backup stored on our servers.
The new account fees are as follows:

·1TB Online Backup account for unlimited computers will be £36 per month, plus an extra fee of £30 p/m per 1Tb of Backup Data will be charged if you exceed your package limit, this additional fee will be billed monthly in advance.
·5TB Online Backup account for Unlimited Computers will be £90 per month, an extra fee of £30 p/m per 1Tb of Backup Data will be charged if you exceed your package limit, this additional fee will be billed monthly in advance.
·1TB Cloud Storage accounts will rise to £14 per month and will no longer include Online Backup, however, you can add this feature at any time and then the above fess would be applicable.


To view the Total volume of your Online Backup, login to your Web Portal and look at the top of the screen for BACKUP (see image below) where it will tell you the total volume of your Online Backup. If your account shows 1TB then you will pay £30 per month, if your account shows 2TB then it will be £60 per month and so on. The space will be rounded up, so 1.3TB will be charged for 2TB space and so on.
[IMG]file:///C:\Users\Jillos\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image002.jpg[/IMG]
Your monthly Usage Charge will be issued on the 14th of each month and must be paid within 48 hours in order to keep your account active, fees that are unpaid for over 7 days will result in your account being closed and all data erased from our servers.

These new pricing plans are to encourage users to perform regular housekeeping of their data and remove backups for computers they no longer have to avoid paying extra fees, as we do not offer an archive service, just a disaster recovery service, it means we encourage you to only backup office documents, pictures, videos and music that are also stored on your computer so that if you lose your computer or it has a drive crash we will hold a backup of the data that was most recently stored on it.

You might be asking why we have introduced these new fees that are clearly much higher than our old prices and we understand the surprise, however, we would remind you that storing data securely is a very expensive service to provide, you will be aware that we have never had any downtime in our many years of service and not one customer has ever had their account hacked, nor has our service ever been compromised, these security and service levels only come with expensive equipment and experienced staff and both are very costly. The cost of the services used by Monster Cloud have increased dramatically over recent months which so far we have managed to absorb so we didn’t have to pass the costs on to our end users, unfortunately we are no longer able to do this which has meant we have to pass these costs on to our customers from today onwards.

If you feel you do not agree to our new pricing structure, you can cancel your account by logging into your Web Portal, click on Account Settings and then click Your Details. On this page, at the bottom, are the details you’ll need to cancel your account.

Jillos

I am seeking out alternatives, and shall post my finding here - would really apprecaite anyone else's too.

HDD backup is great, and I do that too, however when you're changing a lot of files all of the time, you really do need that instant backup too.

beaker141

How does Microsoft OneDrive compare - I buy office 365 for £8 per month, allowing it to be on 5 computers at home for the family, and with that you get onedrive 1Tb included.

TheCyclingProgrammer

I use two services. CrashPlan for a home server and Backblaze. Can't say I've had any issues with either.

phoenix_w

Wow. I can only assume they tried the dot-com school of marketing (build it, give it away/sell it cheap and lose loads of moneys, wait to be bought out by a bigger player - profit!) However the approach they've taken with their existing customer base is just dreadful.

If I were using MC I would retrieve all of my data and make alternative arrangements pretty sharpish - I imagine they aren't going to be around for much longer.

Kermie

I use Carbonite. It's US based but has never let me down, and when I did get a virus (via a client-shared Dropbox folder) I didn't panic because I knew Carbonite had all my data stored safely in the cloud. I pay for the personal plus plan which is $99.99 p.a. which includes my external hard drive, which is my on-site back up.