Accelerate Your Cloud Strategy with DriveHQ: A One-Stop Shop for Online File, Email, FTP, and Web Servers, Plus Data Backup Systems

TL; DR: DriveHQ, an enterprise-ready cloud service provider, made waves as an early entrant to the cloud storage market when it was founded in 2003. Today, the global company offers a range of cloud-based IT services, including online file storage, backups, drive mapping, FTP server hosting, and surveillance. As for what the future holds, DriveHQ plans to release additional collaboration, screen recording, and marketing tools while remaining committed to delivering quality cloud services at affordable prices.

Over the past decade, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model has burst open doors for businesses worldwide, drastically improving accessibility. Not only are SaaS solutions cost-effective — empowering managers to sidestep investments in IT expertise — but they’re also hands-off, shifting technical responsibilities to vendors, rather than in-house talent.

But leaders, beware: You can’t just ask your employees to create free accounts with a handful of cloud-based storage, email, and file transfer services and call it a day. Businesses are organisms with interdependent parts, and they require features that help those parts work together — think collaboration, user management, and access permissions.

Over the past decade, many SaaS companies have caught on to the need for such features as an after-thought, releasing solutions like Dropbox for Business, Microsoft OneDrive and Office 365, and Google G Suite. Others, such as Drive HQ, approached development from a business perspective from the start — long before the heyday of Dropbox’s personal plan, let alone its business product.

“DriveHQ has an advantage in that our service was designed for businesses since it was founded in 2003,” said John Zhang, Founder and CEO of DriveHQ. “It offers powerful, business-centric features, including group user management, granular folder access control, group file sharing and collaboration, cloud file locking, and client-side encryption.”

Today, DriveHQ aims to serve as an all-inclusive provider of enterprise-level cloud services, including file storage and transfer, email, drive mapping, and web server solutions. Customers can expect the company to continue to optimize these solutions moving forward and release new, cloud-based screen recording and marketing tools.

John launched DriveHQ three years before Amazon launched its Simple Storage Service (S3), in 2006. in 2006. A year later, in 2007, Dropbox was founded as a file storage solution built on Amazon’s cloud services.

“Dropbox became extremely popular as a folder synchronization based cloud storage service,” he said. “Later on, many companies, including Google and Microsoft, also launched Dropbox-like cloud storage services.”

Then and now, DriveHQ stands out from the pack, not only for its status as an industry pioneer in cloud storage, but also for its ease of use, affordability, and comprehensive range of business services.

“It is easier to migrate to DriveHQ than to other cloud services because our service is almost identical to businesses’ local drives,” John said. “This means users don’t need any training to use a cloud drive.”

John said that businesses that use a competing cloud service can often migrate to DriveHQ at a lower price and access better features. That’s because DriveHQ’s pricing model differs from those of its competitors.

“Over the years, as the consumer cloud storage service market became saturated, companies like Dropbox completely changed their pricing model,” he said.

Rather than base price on storage space, most providers have switched to user and license-based pricing. DriveHQ keeps prices low through the combination of two pricing models. “Our enterprise user license starts at $1 per user, per month, plus the cost of storage,” he said. “Other major business cloud service providers charge more than $25 per user, per month.”

The company also offers a greater variety of products than some others, from drive mapping and cloud file servers to easy sync, email and web hosting, and file collaboration solutions.

“Our goal is to offer a one-stop solution that includes a cloud-based file server, email server, FTP server, web server, and data backup system,” John said. “We will launch a new business marketing platform in the near future. These features share the same cloud, file, and email storage platform and the same user management and access control system.”

Channeling the energy of its innovation-centric headquarters in Silicon Valley, the DriveHQ team is focused on providing a broad catalog of cutting-edge cloud services designed with an emphasis on user experience.

“Businesses can easily migrate to DriveHQ’s cloud IT service without navigating a steep learning curve,” John said. “And we are consistently improving our services and expanding new enterprise features based on customer feedback.”

To make the software extra user-friendly, John recommends mapping DriveHQ’s cloud storage as a local drive using the WebDAV Cloud Drive Mapping Tool.

“DriveHQ offers the most efficient and reliable cloud file server and WebDAV Drive Mapping service,” he said. “It can easily replace in-house file servers. Employees don’t need training as the cloud drive looks and behaves just like a local drive. You cannot make cloud storage easier than a local drive.”

John said he’s also a big fan of the company’s DriveHQ FileManager client software, which works like a remote file server or FTP server, allowing users to upload and download thousands of files and gigabytes of data in a snap.

“It is extremely reliable and efficient,” he said. “It supports cloud file locking, and you can directly edit cloud files and save them back to the cloud without folder synchronization. If you do like folder synchronization for offline access, FileManager offers the most sophisticated folder synchronization features.”

The software supports multiple sync tasks with different schedules, and users can sync any local folder with any cloud folder. They can also upload, download, or share files via DriveHQ FileManager, WebDAV Drive Mapping, or any web browser.

John told us that DriveHQ is supported by a small team of committed IT professionals who aim to develop innovative products and provide top-notch service to customers.

“DriveHQ is not a huge brand, but we have tens of thousands of loyal business customers and a great reputation among our business customers,” he said. “Without their long-standing support, DriveHQ won’t be able to compete with far larger competitors.”

In terms of product development, the DriveHQ team works closely with customers, careful to incorporate their feedback into updates and new releases.

“In many cases, we are willing to customize our service to meet customer requirements,” John said. “Such customization often results in new features and services that are eventually adopted by many more customers.”

And while DriveHQ’s product and engineering teams have a keen eye for new trends and technologies. Still, the company treds a focused path.

“We don’t blindly expand into other businesses,” John said. “We have only expanded into the cloud storage service for IP cameras and DVRs, leveraging on our super-scalable proprietary FTP server technology and cloud storage platform.”

As for what’s in the pipeline, DriveHQ plans to continue its mission to perfect the DriveHQ FileManager app. John said the team will continue to optimize the app for productivity and group collaboration and add mobile notification and messaging capabilities.

“We also plan to add a screen recording tool (and service) on our CameraFTP.com platform,” he said. “It will help parents monitor kids’ computer usage. Lastly, we will launch a new low-cost marketing platform for SMBs. Please stay tuned!”