GreenQloud Launches Dropbox-Style Client Fueled By Green Energy

    Iceland’s geography once made it one of the least desirable places on earth, but today it offers a number of advantages for IT companies to take advantage of. Its position between Europe and North America give it a nice, central location to store and serve data, and the rugged volcanic landscape provides numerous opportunities for clean geothermal and hydroelectric power. GreenQloud is an Icelandic cloud server and storage company taking advantage of these opportunities, and is leveraging it’s services as the clean alternative to data storage.

    You don’t think about the internet or cloud services being bad for the environment, but the estimated 500,000 datacenters worldwide are drawing a huge amount of energy and contributing to the global carbon emissions crisis. Already GreenQloud claims to have saved the world about 45,000kg of CO2 through their ComputeQloud and StorageQloud services. You can see the breakdown by country of the carbon savings here.

    Like other cloud servers and storage companies, GreenQloud offers ComputeQloud for data crunching, as well as StorageQloud and QloudSync on the storage side. StorageQloud provides the heavy lifting for cloud storage, while QloudSync is the new product realeased just the other day, targeting more of a consumer audience through an easy file syncing option.

    Essentially QloudSync provides the folder-based data syncing and storage solution that we’ve come to expect from Google Drive and Dropbox, acting as a safe and clean home for your photos, movies, music, and documents. On top of telling you how much storage you’re using, they also tell you how much carbon you’ve saved, which is a fun metric to see climb if you’re in to that sort of thing.

    QloudSync stores your data in StorageQloud, which you can view by a web interface. From there, you can share files and folders through social media, or password protect and set expiration limits on links. I like the web design, so it’s a nice alternative.

    QloudSync is already out for Mac, with Windows7 coming out by the end of the week. The Linux version is following sometime soon, with iOS and Android apps hitting phones in the Fall.

    Pricing basically runs $0.095 per GB, which you can calculate here. Currently GreenQloud offers 7 days free, but a representative tells us they will soon be offering a “certain amount of storage free”, similar to other storage syncing solutions.

    Dropbox has served me well over the years, but I’ve been hesitant to upgrade my storage because it’s a pretty big jump from the free version, which starts at $10/month for 100GB. GreenQloud’s 40GB for $3.80 might be a little closer to what I need, and hey, I can say I’m saving the environment.