Leading suppliers of hosted email archiving are telling customers that for a flat monthly fee, their users have "unlimited storage." This is too good to be true. Read the fine print and you are sure to find an "acceptable use clause" that protects the vendor against excessive use. This makes perfect sense. There are hard costs associated with storage, so unless the vendor wants to run his business at a loss, he needs to protect against excessive use. It is better to deal with the issue of maximum storage capacity up front and negotiate a surcharge. This will prevent a messy situation down the road.
Bob Spurzem - In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Iron Mountain Digital Division, which was recently purchased by Autonomy.