Handheld Learning

An interesting competitor, although more on the developer side than the consumer, has turned out to be Amazon. Check out their Amazon Web Services, and in particular the Simple Storage Solution (S3). Charged by amount of storage and bandwidth at micropayment levels (pence). You can also sign up to use many of their very useful other web services including their obviously very sophisticated payment systems.

Amazon AWS

Depending on what you want to use this for, I'd say the variable pricing is a good thing. I'm just working on a project which requires rather huge video files to be stored and occasionally to be accessed. To have those (around 6GB of them) hosted on a traditional ISP's product would cost a fortune (fixed price), no matter how much the files would be accessed or how long I keep them there. With S3 I can have them available and take them off whenever I want to, and I get charged a few pennies for doing so.

As I said, it's not a consumer thing, but if someone wanted to build a web-based learning application which uses lots of data, this would be perfect. The payment systems are great too, as well as their application server thing ("Elastic Compute Cloud" - EC2). Slightly off-topic, here's Michael Mace's take on the payment system offering

Wolf.