humyo

» see humyo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Two offices, London and Berlin, and a company called humyo opened between them in 2007, run by Dan Conlon with the investor Peter Dubens in the chairman's seat. The launch offer was thirty gigabytes of online storage at no cost, which in 2007 was an absurd number. By October 2008 it had been trimmed to ten, split into five gigabytes for pictures and music and five for everything else. The homepage sold that split in four words: no frills, no credit card.

The product was a file locker that knew what kind of file it was holding. Music streamed in the browser instead of downloading and photos came back as thumbnails, while everything else sat in a plain folder tree you could reach from a desktop client or a phone browser. Business accounts cost $9.99 a user and came with a shared workspace, which was the part the company kept pitching to the UK channel while the free tier did the recruiting. The beta closed in March 2008 with 100,000 people signed up and the count was past 215,000 by that August.

Then there was the vault. The company owned a decommissioned Bank of England bullion vault and kept the disk arrays inside it, and that fact went into every article written about it. Trend Micro bought the whole thing on 11 June 2010, announced it as a next-generation online storage play for consumers and small business, and by September the product was called Trend Micro SafeSync.

SafeSync for Home reached what Trend Micro called end of life on 31 January 2016 and end of service exactly one year later. The stated reason was that the service could not feasibly be adapted to keep up with how consumers had started using storage, which by 2016 meant Dropbox and the free tier that came with your phone. The support page that still describes the shutdown puts it without any softening: all data stored in Cloud Storage has been purged.

~ the record ~

~ the vault ~

Storing consumer files in a bank vault made no engineering sense and enormous marketing sense. The threat to a photo archive in 2008 was never a man with a crowbar, it was a company running out of money or interest, and a vault protects against neither. But the word cloud was still new to most people and the honest question they were asking was where, physically, does my stuff go.

The answer humyo gave had a floor and a ceiling, and it worked as an answer for about three years. Nine years after the service ended, the vault is the only part of it that anybody can still describe.

~ ten gigabytes for nothing ~

Free storage was a category you followed rather than a product you chose. The roundup posts of 2008 and 2009 listed humyo next to a dozen other names with a gigabyte count beside each one, and the rational move was to open an account everywhere and keep the same files in three places. Gmail was rationing storage in megabytes at the time and photo hosts capped you by the album, so ten gigabytes with no payment step felt like a mistake somebody would notice and correct.

The offer reached Turkey intact, because a free tier with no card requirement does not care which country you are in. What did not travel was the thing underneath. A home ADSL line here in 2008 gave you a small fraction of its download speed going the other way, so pushing ten gigabytes up to London was a job measured in nights rather than minutes, and the sensible amount to keep in a foreign locker was a folder of documents rather than a music library.

The paid tier was a harder wall. Nine dollars ninety-nine a user per month assumed a card that could bill in a foreign currency, which was a normal thing for a British small business and an errand for everybody else.

~ the purge ~

The year between end of life and end of service is where the ugly part sits. Trend Micro kept taking subscription money for SafeSync past the point where the product had been declared finished, and as of May 2016 there was no published compensation plan for anyone who had prepaid for a long stretch. Then the date arrived and the storage was emptied.

Somebody still pays for humyo.com. It is held through CSC Corporate Domains and covered to 12 December 2026, twenty years after it was first bought, and it answers DNS with two addresses on CSC's parking range. Neither of them accepts a connection.

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