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

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

raddevon — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:16:22 -0800

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!

By: Faint of Butt

Faint of Butt — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:21:47 -0800

What is a "premium online service," and how does it differ from a non-premium online service?

By: raddevon

raddevon — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:25:01 -0800

@Faint You pay for it.

By: Flunkie

Flunkie — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:31:07 -0800

The Oxford English Dictionary. Merriam-Webster's free site is OK for many purposes, but nothing compares to the OED.

By: raddevon

raddevon — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:38:00 -0800

@Flunkie Very nice! I had no idea there was such a thing.

By: ORthey

ORthey — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:40:35 -0800

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.

By: chesty_a_arthur

chesty_a_arthur — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:42:09 -0800

Flickr premium.
Web hosting, period.

By: ewingpatriarch

ewingpatriarch — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 18:56:54 -0800

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.

By: Fiasco da Gama

Fiasco da Gama — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:00:02 -0800

Simultaneously favourite and least favourite: domain registrars.

By: Cat Pie Hurts

Cat Pie Hurts — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:01:14 -0800

easynews

By: rmathew1

rmathew1 — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:03:10 -0800

I'll second flickr for images. Mozy (online backup service) too.

By: sinfony

sinfony — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:07:19 -0800

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.

By: Flunkie

Flunkie — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:08:56 -0800

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".

By: ewingpatriarch

ewingpatriarch — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:13:41 -0800

Ooh! Forgot about mozy, thanks rmathew1. Definitely mozy.

By: raddevon

raddevon — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:25:18 -0800

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.

By: mysterious1der

mysterious1der — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:37:29 -0800

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.

By: mysterious1der

mysterious1der — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:40:16 -0800

Oops, $5, but I'd gladly have paid $10 :-)

By: i_am_joe's_spleen

i_am_joe's_spleen — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:41:38 -0800

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).

By: raddevon

raddevon — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:48:29 -0800

@mysterious1der I had forgotten I had even paid for MeFi it has been so long.

By: grouse

grouse — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:32:19 -0800

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:

academic journals
the OED
Lexis-Nexis
Westlaw
Oxford Reference Online
Encyclopedia Britannica

By: divabat

divabat — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 20:38:25 -0800

Ask MeFi and Artshub (for jobs and info on the arts industry).

By: Fuzzy Skinner

Fuzzy Skinner — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:03:00 -0800

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.

By: Fuzzy Skinner

Fuzzy Skinner — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:12:35 -0800

Oh, also, I have both, but I much prefer Picasa to flickr. 1 gig free storage, and $20/yr for 10 gigs.

By: otherwordlyglow

otherwordlyglow — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:22:42 -0800

Cook's Illustrated - the online service is lovely for browsing and has awesome recipes.

By: tiamat

tiamat — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:24:49 -0800

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.

By: jenkinsEar

jenkinsEar — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:11:09 -0800

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.

By: sugarfish

sugarfish — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:30:11 -0800

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.

By: Kerim

Kerim — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:02:43 -0800

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.

By: DrtyBlvd

DrtyBlvd — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 02:39:53 -0800

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.

By: ersatzkat

ersatzkat — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:51:18 -0800

Flickr - yes. Does Amazon Prime count? Best $$ I ever spent - we've abused the shit out of it.

By: geeky

geeky — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:54:27 -0800

I like SmugMug for selling my photography, but if I were just looking for image and video hosting, I'd got with Flickr.

By: madman

madman — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:32:55 -0800

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?

By: gnomeloaf

gnomeloaf — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:40:35 -0800

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.

By: raddevon

raddevon — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 05:45:03 -0800

@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?

By: hootch

hootch — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:44:36 -0800

EasyNews, Metafilter and web hosting.

By: scrump

scrump — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:16:42 -0800

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.

By: dinger

dinger — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:21:16 -0800

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".

By: Mick

Mick — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:27:02 -0800

Lynda.com, great tutorials.

By: CunningLinguist

CunningLinguist — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:22:57 -0800

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.

By: jscalzi

jscalzi — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:44:58 -0800

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.

By: Katravax

Katravax — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:34:15 -0800

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.:

Hearts of Space music archives (listen to a show free on Sunday to see if you like it)
Safari Books, online technical books
Emusic, indie MP3 downloads
Rhapsody, mainstream subscription music. You pay a monthly fee and listen all you want to anything you want as often as you want
Gamehouse a subscription "casual games" site (stuff like Bejeweled, Zuma, and hundreds more), the Rhapsody of games (I think they're owned by the same people that own Rhapsody, no kidding). You pay a monthly fee and play all the downloadable games you want, as often as you want.
Coast to Coast AM, live-streaming and MP3 archives of the overnight "weirdo topics" radio show
Jeff Rense, archives for another weirdo radio show
PrisonPlanet.Tv, Alex Jones radio show and archives, full-bore the-sky-is-falling anti-new-world-order and conspiracy-theory radio show archives and movies
Amazon Prime, a yearly fee gets you free two-day shipping (and very cheap 1-day shipping) on everything they sell.