According to IDG News Service, “Canonical is shutting down its Ubuntu One cloud-storage service rather than continue to go up against competitors such as Dropbox, Google Drive and EMC Syncplicity.”

The service will be available until June 1, but as of Wednesday last week, customers can no longer sign up for the service or make purchases.  That’s not the worst news; users’ content will be available until July 31, after which it will be deleted.  Yikes.

Canonical said in a blog post on Wednesday that customers with paid accounts will have their fees refunded back to the day of the announcement.  The company also said it will try to give users an easy path to download their content and migrate to other services.

This is not the first storage-as-a-service product to go away, and it won’t be the last.  Last year Nirvanix and MegaCloud went dark, and I suspect others will find that it won’t be an easy thing to compete with the cloud storage leaders, retail and enterprise.  Moreover, the amount of investment required to maintain a storage-as-a-service product is huge, and the cash return in a world of falling cloud prices is difficult.

I suspect there will be many second and third tier cloud providers that give up this year.  So, be careful where you place your data.