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Virgin Media is closing down its cloud storage, hosting, and mobile roaming-charge saving apps as of Apr. 28, the company quietly announced earlier this month. Virgin has worked out a deal with GoDaddy for customers of its Webspace hosting service, giving them a year of free hosting, according to the announcement.

Users of the three services will receive snail-mail notification of the closures. The services are being closed due to Virgin's customers "choosing to use alternative apps and services."

The company is referring customers of storage app Virgin Media Cloud to Dropbox, as the evidence rolls in that not every company theoretically capable of offering cloud storage should do so. In the last few years cloud storage services have been closed by Barracuda Networks, Wuala, Canonical, AVG, and Nirvanix, and very nearly Bitcasa.

Dropbox, by contrast, has grown so much that it is largely moving from AWS to its own infrastructure. Virgin is suggesting its storage customers migrate to Dropbox, and offering to help them do so.

Read more: GoDaddy Launches Cloud Servers and Bitnami-Powered Cloud Apps Worldwide

Webspace customers will receive a code in the letter they get in the post, which grants them 12 months of hosting, use of the website builder, a domain name, and email from GoDaddy. The announcement touts GoDaddy's 1 GB of storage as superior to Webspace, and said customers can expect to save nearly £60 (about $85).

SmartCall is a bundle-utilization service allowing customers to allocate mobile calls to their land-line plan, saving roaming charges and limited minutes. Virgin has declined to renew its contract with the technology partner for the service.

The closures reflect the increase in competition among service providers, but also demonstrate a reasonable public relations effort by a consumer-facing company.

Source: Virgin Media Moves Customers to GoDaddy as it Shuts Down Hosting Service