If first impressions are important CloudZow has already proven to me that they are not really serious about online backup but are serious about being a multi level marketing scheme. I first started to hear about this new service from a number of comments that have been left here on the site. When I say a number it was a significant double digit number of comments from a number of different people all leaving affiliate links that pointed to different places but all ended up at CloudZow. Now I have no problem with affiliate links, obviously I use them here on the site, but I am more interested in offering good information to people to help them make a wise decision about online backup. I don’t push services to number one based on their affiliate payout or simply because they offer to buy the top spot. To put it simply, I tell the truth as I see it and the affiliate links help to pay the bills.
Back to CloudZow though. If you do a search for them on Google or even better on YouTube you don’t find much information about the service, instead you find a great deal of information on their affiliate program. To sum it up their affiliate program is a pretty basic multi level marketing program. Thus the cause of all of the comments from many of their affiliates here on the website I would suspect. They are all trying to get as many people to be under them as possible and instead of trying to make a decent website talking about CloudZow, just leave useless comments on a decent website about online backup. Not a good way for CloudZow to make an impression on me.
Since all of these CloudZow affiliates felt the need to leave useless comments all over my website I decided to take a look at this new online backup service, trying hard to not be biased because of the actions of their affiliates, but honestly how could I not be biased. The home page of the CloudZow website looked not to bad so I clicked the Sign Up Today link and expected to be able to sign up for their free trial they say they offer. Now a company that is serious about signing up customers you would expect to just be presented with a sign up form, not CloudZow, they offer you a great little line telling you that to sign up you need to “Contact your referring affiliate to get started today!”. Hmm not helping my impression of this company, I suppose it is great that they are supporting their affiliates but they seem to be more concerned about those affiliate sign ups than customer sign ups directly. Considering how competitive the online backup space is you would think they would just want people to sign up no matter what, but apparently not.
Since I could not sign up directly I went back and looked at some of the comments mentioning CloudZow here on my pendng comments section and picked one that seemed less spammy more intelligent than the others and clicked through. This took me to a landing page and eventually a sign up page. Lots of hops just to sign up for a service that is suppose to be easy. Once I was signed up I got my next red flag about the service. I got a welcome email with my user name and password sent to me in plain text over email. Not the most secure method of sending me my password, in fact anyone that could gain access to my email could also then gain access to all of my computer files that are backed up to CloudZow. Not impressed so far about the service.
Now that I have an account I could sign in to the website and download the client to install. The next red flag is on the login page on CloudZow. The link to the login screen on CloudZow goes to a plain http web page, not a https page by default. Now you can add https to the login page and it uses SSL encryption but this should be a red flag to all users to make sure they sign in using https. Why would an online backup company that is supposed to be concerned about security not have the login page and user account area default to using SSL I don’t know but it is a concern how secure they are.
I have since downloaded the Windows desktop application but have not had a chance to install it. It would be nice if their website gave more details about their actual application and service instead of focusing so much on the multi level marketing aspect. For example there are little to no details about where the data is stored, what kind of encryption is used, if you can use your own private encryption key etc. This service appears to have been built by someone more interested in multi level marketing and not someone with a passion to keep your data safe.
In any event my first impressions of this service are pretty poor and for $5.00/month you will be much better off with Backblaze or CrashPlan. Companies that you can trust to keep your data safe.
Note: I have not actually linked to their website because even if I did you would not be able to sign up through it, since I am not an affiliate for them, and I doubt I will ever be. Also note that any CloudZow affiliates that leave comments here that in my opinion are a total waste of my and my readers time will be marked as spam and deleted like all of the others!
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