I wonder what the enshitification track looks like for a cloud data hosting company. I use it because it is convenient, has good coverage (iOS, windows and Linux (kinda)). Not secure, but I treat it like a big post card repository. What are folks using instead?
OneDrive. Not because I love Microsoft. I do not. I just dislike Google more and it’s …the least inconvenient.
I switched from Proton mail to Exchange before Proton offered file storage because I wanted a groupware solution. I’ve considered switching back to Proton but just haven’t had time to seriously look into it yet.
Edit: I just remembered the other hangup. Fucking Excel. It’s a monster but it can do things that no other spreadsheet program can do. Every once in a great while I need to use a bunch of VBA code or some obscure function that doesn’t exist in Libre Office.
Most people aren’t going to have this problem though.
When spreadsheeting software doesn’t have a feature you need, I feel the most logical next step is to write a program in a simple language like python to do it. (there is a reason data scientists like it so much)
It happened a while ago. They reduced the number of devices you can sync to, removed the ability to gain extra free storage from referrals and always push higher tier upgrades even if you are a paying customer. The last straw was when they redesigned the client to incorporate a ton of things no one asked for unrelated to syncing files.
If you have your own server (or VPS) you can use Seafile. Works well enough to sync your data.
What’s a bit problematic is integrations. For example on Android there are apps that can automatically sync data over Dropbox. Using your own solution doesn’t really work there.
Yes. Digital Ocean was suggested by a colleague. When I looked it up it just took too much work for all the platforms I use. I’m happy to see all the suggestions I’m getting tho.
I personally rent a small VPS (At https://www.netcup.eu/, German hoster) with Ubuntu server and use Mailcow (as Docker container) with it.
Setting this up was relatively quick (2-3 hours maybe?), but you really need to know what you’re doing. Like getting started with the container is easy, but you also have to set up DNS for your server, reverse DNS and several things for your email server to look legit (DKIM, certificates, spf DNS entry, …).
After the setup it runs well, though there are still things you’ll have to be careful about. Like making sure that your certificate (usually LetsEncrypt, it’s free) gets switched out regularly in the container (with a post-certificate-renewal hook usually).
Overall, quite a headache if you don’t like to mess around with things.
And even worse if you fully rely on that mail server for important things. I still don’t use my own one for work, banking, taxes and so on, just too risky.
I wonder what the enshitification track looks like for a cloud data hosting company. I use it because it is convenient, has good coverage (iOS, windows and Linux (kinda)). Not secure, but I treat it like a big post card repository. What are folks using instead?
OneDrive. Not because I love Microsoft. I do not. I just dislike Google more and it’s …the least inconvenient. I switched from Proton mail to Exchange before Proton offered file storage because I wanted a groupware solution. I’ve considered switching back to Proton but just haven’t had time to seriously look into it yet.
Edit: I just remembered the other hangup. Fucking Excel. It’s a monster but it can do things that no other spreadsheet program can do. Every once in a great while I need to use a bunch of VBA code or some obscure function that doesn’t exist in Libre Office. Most people aren’t going to have this problem though.
When spreadsheeting software doesn’t have a feature you need, I feel the most logical next step is to write a program in a simple language like python to do it. (there is a reason data scientists like it so much)
Proton Drive
It happened a while ago. They reduced the number of devices you can sync to, removed the ability to gain extra free storage from referrals and always push higher tier upgrades even if you are a paying customer. The last straw was when they redesigned the client to incorporate a ton of things no one asked for unrelated to syncing files.
Nextcloud and Syncthing
If you have your own server (or VPS) you can use Seafile. Works well enough to sync your data.
What’s a bit problematic is integrations. For example on Android there are apps that can automatically sync data over Dropbox. Using your own solution doesn’t really work there.
Yes. Digital Ocean was suggested by a colleague. When I looked it up it just took too much work for all the platforms I use. I’m happy to see all the suggestions I’m getting tho.
I personally rent a small VPS (At https://www.netcup.eu/, German hoster) with Ubuntu server and use Mailcow (as Docker container) with it.
Setting this up was relatively quick (2-3 hours maybe?), but you really need to know what you’re doing. Like getting started with the container is easy, but you also have to set up DNS for your server, reverse DNS and several things for your email server to look legit (DKIM, certificates, spf DNS entry, …).
After the setup it runs well, though there are still things you’ll have to be careful about. Like making sure that your certificate (usually LetsEncrypt, it’s free) gets switched out regularly in the container (with a post-certificate-renewal hook usually).
Overall, quite a headache if you don’t like to mess around with things.
And even worse if you fully rely on that mail server for important things. I still don’t use my own one for work, banking, taxes and so on, just too risky.
Owncloud (self-hosted).