Dropbox is undoubtedly one of the best online file sharing and backup options, when you are dealing with multiple computers or mobile devices. The basic version of Dropbox offers only 2GB of free storage which is more than sufficient for backing up a handful of files. You can however, expand Dropbox file storage space with referrals or upgrade to a paid plan; which will cost you $9.99 per month for 50GB and $19.99 per month for 100 GB of storage space.

On the other hand, if you want to use Dropbox for business or within your organization and want more storage space for all your employees, here is some good news.

Dropbox For Teams – 1000 GB of Storage Space For 5 Users

Dropbox has recently launched a new storage plan for businesses and organizations, who require an enormus cloud storage space for their employees. If your business is completely web based and you need a reliable service which can offer cloud file sharing and synchronization within a selected group of users, you might want to use Dropbox for teams.

The “Dropbox for teams ” plan includes a hefty 1TB (1000GB) of storage space for 5 users, costing at $795 annually. The earlier storage space was only 350 GB but Dropbox has upgraded the storage space by as much as 3 times in their recent plan upgrade.

You can of course add more users to your file sharing team by paying an additional annual fee of $125 for each user. On adding an additional user, your entire storage space will be bumped by 200GB. That’s a huge amount of space to consider.

Dropbox for teams also provides administrative control within your file sharing system. The administrator of your file sharing system can grant necessary access permissions to other users, so this makes sure which users can access which files/folders and which users can overwrite recent files with their own versions. Unlike the regular Dropbox account, Dropbox for teams offers unlimited revision histories, so you will never lose an earlier copy of a file that was uploaded months ago.

This plan is not geared towards home users, as the pricing is above the average line for personal use.

Should You Use Dropbox for Teams Or Upgrade to Another Paid Dropbox plan?

Whether you should use the teams plan for your business or use a regular paid plan of Dropbox, strictly  depends on your core requirements.

If your employees are not under one office and need a super easy way to send large files to their colleagues, the regular paid plans of Dropbox would be worth going for. If 100GB of storage space  does not sound enough and you need more storage space to share HD videos, large project files, files in a web server, tons of documents, photos and so forth, Dropbox for teams will be an ideal choice.

If the storage space and administrative rights is not a concern and 100GB sounds more than enough, you should choose the Dropbox pro plan, which costs only $19.99 a month ($240 a year). That’s a savings of $555 a year.

Another disadvantage of the Dropbox for teams plan is that there is no option to pay bills monthly. You have to pay an annual of $795 in one shot and there is no way you can downgrade to an earlier plan, after a few months going forward.

Why not use a web hosting service or a home web server within your office?

Makes sense, right?

You can pay a fee of $15 a month and grab an unlimited amount of storage space with any of the popular web hosting providers e.g Hostgator, GoDaddy or Dreamhost. I agree this is not an ideal backup and sync solution for companies and businesses but if your employees are well acquainted  on handling an FTP server, using an internal web server is very cost effective solution. Of course, you won’t get automatic and out of the box file sync properties as Dropbox provides but it is certainly more secured and the data stays in your hands only.

There is only one catch – be sure to check with the tech support of your hosting company because some web hosts do not allow file backups of executable files. In the worst case, you might lose all your files so be careful!

If all else fails, you can use Poguplug or install a home web server within your office using Apache and Windows. This requires no costing and installation charges and your file sharing server is available round the clock, as long as the server and the host computers are connected to the internet. No foreign hands tampering with your data!

Check out the  Dropbox for Teams FAQ here.