We’ve been following the rise of cloud storage quite avidly here on SiliconANGLE, from its humble beginnings as a mere, albeit beautiful concept, to the rise of services like Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive and others.

Each of these offers a pretty decent service – users ge their own ‘space’ in the cloud to upload and store their files, plus other functions like web apps etc. But there’s one problem that remains – the ‘space’ we’re offered is kind of limited, unless we’re prepared to pay for it.

Enter Space Monkey, a Kickstarter project that’s aiming to try and solve this problem. Space Monkey understands that most of us don’t want to pay excessive prices for cloud storage, and so its come up with a solution that allows it to charge just a fraction of the cost of its rival services.

To do so, Space Monkey is changing the way that cloud storage works from the ground up. Traditional cloud storage is hosted in massive data centers, but while this is an effective way of doing things, it costs an awful lot of money to keep those data centers up and running, and those costs are inevitably passed onto the consumer.

Space Monkey’s solution effectively does away with the expensive data centers, bringing the cloud into your home instead.

Why is Space Monkey Different?

It works like this – users pay a $10 a month fee and in return they’re given a small “Space Monkey” device that allows up to a whopping 1TB of storage, which is simultaneously stored on both device and the company’s encrypted shared network. This data is broken up into 40 different ‘pieces’ of data, with half of them being parity pieces and the other half being erasure coded. So instead of being stored in a central data server, all of those ‘Space Monkeys’ are essentially tied together to create a network-based data center that hosts your digital files.

Space Monkey is clearly something quite different, and though some might be skeptical, it really is a genius idea.

Space Monkey solves a number of problems that exist with traditional cloud servers. Supposing there’s a major storm like Hurricane Sandy and half the data servers in New York get knocked out again. Users will still be able to access their data because they only ever need to be able to access half of the bits floating around Space Monkey’s network. Another benefit is speed – because the Space Monkey device is in your local network, data transfer rates will be much faster than uploading to something like Dropbox. Lastly, Space Monkey is far, far cheaper than anything we’ve seen so far. While Dropbox et al all offer a little bit of free space, the moment you want to upgrade you’ll be in for shock. Space Monkey on the other hand, gives users up to 1TB to start with, which is far more than most people will ever need.

Watch Out Dropbox, the Monkeys are Coming

Looking at the competition, it’s clear that there is no competition to what Space Monkey can offer. Services like Dropbpox, Google Drive etc typically offer anything from 2-3 GB up to a max of 15 GB free space, and once this runs out you’ll need to pay a hefty price for an upgrade.

Should these companies be worried? For now, they won’t be unduly concerned because they all have something that Space Monkey doesn’t – trust. Space Monkey will need to work hard to gain user’s trust because, after all, if you have sensitive data ‘out there’ bouncing around in its virtual network, it’s natural you might be worried about who could gain access to it. The other problem is that Space Monkey isn’t free – it’s very, very cheap, but ten dollars a month is still ten dollars a month – and not everyone needs 1TB of storage, they’re happy to get by with free services.

But for those who do need more storage, they’ll find a definite advanatge in what Space Monkey has to offer. Compared with Google Drive’s $49.99 a month/per TB of storage, or Dropbox’s $66.5 a month, Space Monkey is a steal.