7 Hidden Costs of Sending Large Files
Free isn’t always free — especially when it comes to technology, where the allure of free or open-source software seems appealing at the start, but there’s always a cost. Often, those hidden costs are large.
When it comes to sending large files over the Internet, there are options, including free and low-cost transfer solutions. It’s always worth asking: What are the hidden costs?
That’s the topic of today’s article.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Sending Large Files
How large a file is relative, but for this purpose, we’ll say a large file is any file of 500MB or more. These are the sort of files that you can’t merely send as an attachment to your email. We’re talking about sending large data files, video, and other media.
To send files of this size, you either need to put together your own internal large-file transfer tool or purchase an enterprise-ready solution. When it comes to rolling your own, most don’t realize there are hidden costs.
The 7 Hidden Costs of Sending Large Files
The true cost of sending large files extends beyond the price of the transfer service itself. Solutions with limited functionality often introduce hidden costs that go beyond money. Relying on free or low-cost tools can amplify these expenses, impacting your most valuable resources — time, budget, and missed opportunities.
Time
One of the obvious hidden costs of sending large files is time. But that doesn’t just mean time waiting for your file to reach the intended recipient. It’s a matter of bad user experience. It’s a matter of poorly designed apps wasting your time.
Time is the ultimate cost in business. Acceleration, latency, ease of use, and network interruptions all impact the time it takes you to send a file with free or low-cost transfer tools.
Some people will remember the old AOL dial-up sound that buzzed from your computer every time you accessed the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s become the digital meme of slow internet speeds. Today, the sound may be gone. But sending large files can still take a long time if you don’t take the right steps to accelerate it.
High Latency
Another note on time — that’s how costly it is. Latency is the time it takes for a packet of data to transfer from one point to another in a network.
This is the most obvious cost of sending large files: If you do so inefficiently, the file can take an unnecessarily long time to arrive at the recipient.
Money
Now let’s talk about one of the dark patterns in file transfer tools. Some of the supposedly low-cost solutions can get very financially expensive. These companies appear affordable in their marketing, but costs can balloon when it comes time to use their services to send large files in the real business world.
The killer is hidden fees and costs that scale based on usage. Beware of any company charging you for how much of your own bandwidth you already purchased or scaling fees the more you send. Think of an invisible thumb pressing down on the scales that you didn’t factor into your costs.
Scaling
Maybe the hidden costs are simply a case of scale: Your organization needs to transfer more large files than you anticipated. You have sudden peaks of work followed by valleys. That sudden TV show got the green light, and footage is coming to you next week. That additional scale can cost a lot when it’s not accounted for in advance.
Can it grow with you without costing more? Can it scale up and down to meet your needs during peak times and when things are slower?
Security
Security goes beyond transport encryption. Your team also needs to think about who truly controls your files.
Many file transfer services store your files on their servers or temporarily hold them in transit. This could mean putting valuable content in the hands of an outside organization, risking not only their data but also their trust in your services.
The alternative is to use a transfer solution that ensures both secure protocols and full ownership of your files. Don’t risk losing both trust and future revenue.
IT Resources
Your IT team might have more than just cybersecurity to think about. With free services like FTP and rsync, the hidden cost might be IT resources, monitoring, upgrading, and patching.
Sometimes sending large files requires direct interaction and help from the IT team. This means scheduling with the help desk, waiting your turn in the queue, and finally using limited IT team resources just to send a file.
Brand
The final hidden cost to sending large files is this: A bad user experience can harm your brand.
Your file transfer service is a client-facing representation of your brand. Done well, it provides a functional, seamless, branded concierge touchpoint. Done poorly, it sucks any excitement or joy your clients feel about your brand right out of the room.
Send Files Fast — Without the Hidden Costs
The Signiant Platform gives businesses a straightforward and secure large file-sharing tool suite. Here’s how:
- Speed: Signiant moves content up to 100X faster than standard internet transmission.
- Latency: Signiant eliminates the impacts of latency and packet loss
- Clear pricing: Signiant’s predictable pricing means you never get a surprise bill, and the software is packaged and priced for any size operation.
- Built for scale: There’s a reason Signiant works with some of the largest media companies in the world. Our platform is built to handle any scale.
- Security: Signiant completed the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) Gold Assessments for its SaaS for security. Our platform is SOC 2, Type 2 compliant, ensuring stringent security.
- Simplicity: We pride ourselves on making it easy for your team to send large files fast — there’s no need to pull IT into this one.
- Brand positive: Signiant is trusted by some of the world’s most famous brands, where appearances matter. We’ll make sure your team and customers have a pleasant experience sending and receiving large files with custom-branded portals for each project.
With over 1,000,000 global end users, the Signiant Platform is the de facto industry standard for accelerated file transfers. Transfer even the largest media assets with ease. Leverage our patented technology to eliminate the frustrations of slow transfers and network limitations.
In other words: All the benefits you want in a large file transfer provider — with none of the hidden costs.
