You are almost out of space for your Gmail account.

Google has begun promoting its paid storage space to users of its webmail service, Gmail, starting at $20/year for six gigabytes.

Gmail was introduced with the premise that you will never have to delete mail, but now Google has started peddling its "extended storage" plans to heavy users like this scribbler, in other words "e-mail hoarders". But I don't blame Google as, for some of us, our Gmail inboxes are big giant "archives in the sky". OK, "cloud" as Voles put it.

Well, discard no more. Just as my Gmail Inbox was at 99 percent with the dreaded, "your account is almost full" message - later reduced to 96 percent after a purge- Google surprised me. And I guess everyone else with a banner on top reading: "You are almost out of space for your Gmail account. You can view our tips on reducing your email storage or purchase additional storage". And there is also a link at the page footer: "Need more space? Upgrade your storage", clearly hinting at the firm's eagerness for users to contract the service. Back in January 2006 I said, "Now that I think about it, I'd sleep better at night if I could pay a small yearly fee to Google", well they took their time, but now I can pay them for the privilege of not deleting stuff.

Google is initially offering four storage plans, starting with six gigabytes for $20/year, and culminating with a whopping 250GB - this is similar to a lot of people's hard drives - at $500 per year. On the middle ground, there's 25GB for $75 and 100GB for $250. The space is shared by your Gmail account and "Picasa Web". As more and more people put their high-res digital photos online, and as megapixels go up and people become used to leaving everything in "the cloud", I'm sure this will be a healthy source of Google revenue.

In that sense, Google is competing now with hosting companies. But if you intend to use Google's space only for Picasaweb pictures, I humbly suggest you do the maths, as I think hosting companies still have an edge. The hosting provider I use for one of my domains has, for instance, a 110 GB plan - yes that's gigabytes of storage, and 5TB of data transfer per month - for $5 per month (that translates to $60/year for 110GB vs Google's 100GB for $250, in other words $0.54/GB vs Google's $2.50/GB).

Your own hosting account also lets you upload and put online thousands of pictures if you want, plus having other uses and flexibility that Google cannot match, like associating domain names, hosting your own forums -all a bit more work, of course, but the only option for control freaks. A regular hosting account is attractive specially with easy to use tools like jAlbum which make creating online photo galleries a point-and-click endeavor, just as easy as Picasa Web.

Related:
Google rolls out paid storage services