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What are your favorite premium online services (of any kind) and why?
December 21, 2008 6:16 PM   RSS feed for this thread Subscribe

What are your favorite premium online services (of any kind) and why?

I'm looking for services of all kinds (photo sharing, video sharing, online backup, online file storage, music, etcetera). Feel free to give multiple answers in different categories or just a single answer. Contribute as little or as much as you want!
posted by raddevon to computers & internet (40 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
What is a "premium online service," and how does it differ from a non-premium online service?
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:21 PM on December 21, 2008


@Faint You pay for it.
posted by raddevon at 6:25 PM on December 21, 2008


The Oxford English Dictionary. Merriam-Webster's free site is OK for many purposes, but nothing compares to the OED.
posted by Flunkie at 6:31 PM on December 21, 2008


@Flunkie Very nice! I had no idea there was such a thing.
posted by raddevon at 6:38 PM on December 21, 2008


Since you say "of any kind," I'll throw out a fairly esoteric one: Baseball Prospectus. It's probably the top pay site for baseball statheads, and it's fantastically awesome.
posted by ORthey at 6:40 PM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite]


Flickr premium.
Web hosting, period.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:42 PM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite]


SVN hosting.

emusic - I get the 100 songs a month plan. No DRM of any sort, and a very good library, much better than iTunes' for my music taste.

Netflix in theory, but I don't have time to watch movies any more. Was great when I did have time, though.

World of Warcraft, same reason/situation as Netflix.

Steam.
posted by ewingpatriarch at 6:56 PM on December 21, 2008


Simultaneously favourite and least favourite: domain registrars.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 7:00 PM on December 21, 2008


easynews
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 7:01 PM on December 21, 2008


I'll second flickr for images. Mozy (online backup service) too.
posted by rmathew1 at 7:03 PM on December 21, 2008


Flickr and web hosting.

Steam isn't a premium service, you just have to pay for games. Steam is the delivery mechanism and community interface, and it's free.
posted by sinfony at 7:07 PM on December 21, 2008


If you like ORthey's suggestion of Baseball Prospectus, you may also be interested in Baseball Reference. Their free site by itself is fantastic, but paying a modest annual fee gives you access to their "Play Index", which allows you to do fairly arbitrary queries. For example, "Show me all pitchers who Fred Stanley tripled against" or "Who is the pitcher who had the most consecutive games in which he hit a home run" or "Show me every player who had a season with at least 15 triples but less than 10 doubles".
posted by Flunkie at 7:08 PM on December 21, 2008


Ooh! Forgot about mozy, thanks rmathew1. Definitely mozy.
posted by ewingpatriarch at 7:13 PM on December 21, 2008


Wow. You guys really have some great stuff. Keep 'em coming.

I might as well weigh in. I went back to flickr after a couple years of trying to make zooomr work for me. Everything about flickr is just more polished than anything else I've tried.

I have never used the premium version of Dropbox, but it is an incredible file hosting service. I want the premium version but can't afford to shell out for it at the moment. The only difference in the premium version and the free version is storage space so I don't feel bad listing this even though I haven't paid for it yet.

Some that look cool but that I haven't tried at all yet:
Backblaze- unlimited automated online backup solution for $50/year per computer
Smugmug- Video and photo hosting. The people who use this really seem to love it, but it seems a little pricey to me (between $40 and $150/year) especially considering video is limited to 5 minutes per HD video on the $150 package
Vimeo- Video hosting (w/ HD). Offers a premium service that increases the upload limit to 2GB per week (1GB per file). This also allows for embedding of videos. Seems to be the best consumer HD hosting/streaming solution at $60/year.
posted by raddevon at 7:25 PM on December 21, 2008


Mozy

And a completely non-sarcastic (but very meta and somewhat navel-gazing) answer: Metafilter. It's the best tech-support/how-the-crap-did-I-mess-up-this-CSS-stylesheet/vacation-planning-service that money can buy. Best $10 I ever spent.
posted by mysterious1der at 7:37 PM on December 21, 2008


Oops, $5, but I'd gladly have paid $10 :-)
posted by mysterious1der at 7:40 PM on December 21, 2008


I am very happy about my Salon subscription. Very cheap for the value I feel I get out of it (cf a dead tree magazine subscription).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:41 PM on December 21, 2008


@mysterious1der I had forgotten I had even paid for MeFi it has been so long.
posted by raddevon at 7:48 PM on December 21, 2008


I don't think I personally pay for any internet services beyond basic connectivity, but some things that are paid for by my current or previous organizations that I have found very useful are:
posted by grouse at 8:32 PM on December 21, 2008


Ask MeFi and Artshub (for jobs and info on the arts industry).
posted by divabat at 8:38 PM on December 21, 2008


Not sure if this meets your definition of an "online service" but I gladly pay for a subscription to Jimmy Pardo's Never Not Funny podcast. About $50 a year including the audio file and the streaming and downloadable video. It's the most laughs-per-dollar of any entertainment I pay for.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:03 PM on December 21, 2008 [2 favorites]


Oh, also, I have both, but I much prefer Picasa to flickr. 1 gig free storage, and $20/yr for 10 gigs.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 9:12 PM on December 21, 2008


Cook's Illustrated - the online service is lovely for browsing and has awesome recipes.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 9:22 PM on December 21, 2008


Seconding Steam.

Their weekend deals and cheap classic games keep me in video games. I've bought a lot of games off steam which I had previously pirated in my mis-spent youth. :)

Also GOG (Good Old Games) in theory; I've never actually bought anything there as they seem to uniquely sell games I already own.
posted by tiamat at 9:24 PM on December 21, 2008


I subscribe to O'Reilly's Safari service, which gives you access to electronic versions of their catalog, and allows a limited number of PDF chapter downloads.
posted by jenkinsEar at 10:11 PM on December 21, 2008


Seconding netflix but more specifically with tivo. I've had a netflix account for years, but since I linked the two we've watched more movies than in the previous year.
posted by sugarfish at 10:30 PM on December 21, 2008


I pay for the following:

Flickr, because I like it enough I want to have unlimited uploads.

Luxsci IMAP, because even though their webmail interface isn't quite up to snuff, I need absolute reliability from my IMAP account and I'm not willing to trust free services for work and family related e-mail.

And SpanningSync, which keeps my Mac address book and iCal in sync with my work computer, as well as Google, because I don't much care for MobileMe (although it seems to be improving).

Some services I really like but haven't paid for premium because the free service is good enough: Evernote and DropBox in particular.
posted by Kerim at 11:02 PM on December 21, 2008


Smugmug - it's a no-brainer in a lot of ways if it meets your needs.

Their support, when needed, is absolutely first-class and worth every penny.
posted by DrtyBlvd at 2:39 AM on December 22, 2008


Flickr - yes. Does Amazon Prime count? Best $$ I ever spent - we've abused the shit out of it.
posted by ersatzkat at 3:51 AM on December 22, 2008


I like SmugMug for selling my photography, but if I were just looking for image and video hosting, I'd got with Flickr.
posted by geeky at 4:54 AM on December 22, 2008


What specifically are you looking for? Or is this simply polling the members in a "what is your favourite band (of any genre)" type of question?
posted by madman at 5:32 AM on December 22, 2008


A slightly different take...Harper's Magazine offers full access to their archives (in PDF form) with a subscription. While I'm officially paying for the paper version, I've gotten more out of that service than I thought I would.
posted by gnomeloaf at 5:40 AM on December 22, 2008


@madman I'm looking to uncover some gems I otherwise wouldn't have known about, but I'm also looking for the most popular paid services.

Has anyone had personal experience with lynda.com?
posted by raddevon at 5:45 AM on December 22, 2008


EasyNews, Metafilter and web hosting.
posted by hootch at 9:44 AM on December 22, 2008


SmugMug, Cooks Illustrated and the New York Times Premium Crosswords are the three things we actually pay for. Cooks Illustrated is the best $35 I've spent recently.
posted by scrump at 10:16 AM on December 22, 2008


MobileMe, or me.com, or whatever Apple is calling their premium service these days. We are a multiple Mac and iPhone family, and keeping everything synced so painlessly is well worth it.

Tip: buy renewals at a major online retailer that begins with "A".
posted by dinger at 10:21 AM on December 22, 2008


Lynda.com, great tutorials.
posted by Mick at 4:27 PM on December 22, 2008


Flickr Pro, Amazon Prime (I didn't believe it was worth it for the longest time, then a friend convinced me to try it and it's the bestest thing ever) and Cook's Illustrated for their biblical website.

Please don't do that nasty @ thing here. Thank you.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:22 PM on December 22, 2008


Rhapsody. All the music I want, easy to use, great for exploring, and the artists get paid when I play their music. I buy more music, not less, because I listen to it here first.
posted by jscalzi at 7:44 PM on December 22, 2008


My favorites, and I subscribe to all of them. I listen to the shows while I play the games. Some of these have been mentioned before, but here they are again.:
posted by Katravax at 10:34 PM on December 22, 2008


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