The crossover point
On a 1 Gbps link at 150 ms with 3% loss, a 1 GB file took 4 minutes in RIPTON CLOUD's published test; at that rate a terabyte moves in well under a courier day. Use the calculator with your link to see where your crossover is.
RIPTON CLOUD vs shipping drives
When the network beats the courier, and when it does not.
Drives in a box still move a lot of the world's media and research data because the network path was too slow to trust. Accelerated transfer changes the arithmetic on most routes, and the calculator on this site lets you check yours.
Competitor facts are taken from Couriers's public pages, retrieved 2026-09-13, and linked below. No speed multiple against Shipping hard drives is claimed; RIPTON CLOUD's figures are against a TCP baseline in a published test.
About Shipping hard drives
Shipping a drive means copying to media, packing, a courier's transit time, unpacking and copying again, plus the risk and paperwork of a physical object in transit.
Side by side
Published facts only. Where a vendor does not publish something, the table says so.
| Criterion | Shipping hard drives | RIPTON CLOUD |
|---|---|---|
| Time | Copy out, courier transit of one to several days, copy in. | Limited by the link; the calculator estimates it from size, bandwidth, latency and loss. |
| Cost | Media, packaging, courier, and staff time on both ends, per shipment. | Published: Free $0; Starter $99/mo; Professional $499/mo; Business $1,499/mo; Enterprise from $2,500/mo. Annual plans include two months free. |
| Chain of custody | Physical: tracking numbers, signatures, and encryption if someone remembered to enable it. | Mandatory AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 with a forward-secret key per session; replay protection per subflow; there is no plaintext mode. |
| Delivery record | Courier proof of delivery; nothing about the data. | Per-package records including recipient download events. |
| Repeatability | Every shipment is a new job. | REST API, CLI, scheduler, watch folders and webhooks from Professional; SAML SSO, roles and full audit from Professional; SCIM on Business. |
| Failure mode | Lost or damaged drive; a reshipment. | Retransmission and resume; a completed package is verified. |
When Shipping hard drives is the better choice
- There is no usable network at one end, for example a remote set or a vessel.
- The volume is in the hundreds of terabytes and the link is small.
- Policy forbids the data on any network.
When RIPTON CLOUD is the better choice
- Both ends have a link of a few hundred megabits or more.
- The turnaround matters: dailies, deliverables, datasets that someone is waiting on.
- You need to know it arrived, intact, today.
The differences that decide it
Custody
A drive is a thing that can be lost. A RIPTON package is encrypted on every packet, verified on arrival and logged.
FAQ
Questions about switching from Shipping hard drives.
What about petabytes?
At that scale, physical transfer or a dedicated circuit may still win. RIPTON CLOUD is for the routes where the network can carry the data inside the window.
Can I try it before I stop shipping drives?
Yes. Run one real delivery on the Free plan and compare it against the courier time you have today.
Sources
- RIPTON CLOUD benchmark conditions and results
- File transfer calculator
- RIPTON CLOUD pricing
- RIPTON CLOUD security design
Vendor names and marks belong to their owners. If a fact here is out of date, tell us at hello@riptoncloud.com and we will correct it.
Decide with numbers
Run both on your route.
Bring the files and the path that hurt today. We will help you time RIPTON CLOUD against what you use now, with the conditions written down, so the decision is yours and the evidence is reusable.