Google has offered users of Gmail and photo website Picasa the facility to buy more storage for two years, for those users who go over their free allowance.
Now it is offering a range of options from 20GB of extra storage for a year at a cost of $5 to 16 terabytes for $4,096 — enough for eight million photos.
While the offer is primarily aimed at the moment at those storing photos on Picasa, more people are turning to "cloud computing" to store information using systems such as Google Documents, rather than using their own hard drives.
Google was the first free email service to offer users significant storage, launching with 1GB in 2004, compared with Yahoo! Mail's 4MB. Gmail users now enjoy about 7GB of free storage.
Elvin Lee, a software engineer at Google who blogged about the new storage offer, said: "While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further."