Currently, I’m on a shared hosting plan with my hosting provider. I’ve farmed out email to Google with Google Apps. I use Amazon’s Cloud Drive for their cloud music player (+20GB online space). I use flickr to host my pictures. I’d like to combine everything into one provider. However, my experiments in self-hosted pictures haven’t turned out so good (and I’d need about 300GB space). And I’d need another 200 GB or so for music. Any ideas on how I could do this on my own?
I’ve thought about using AWS with their EC2 compute cloud and S3 for storage, but there’s no easy way to talk between the two (Why not, Amazon??).
I’ve looked into VPS solutions, because most of the time, everything will sit idle. But I can’t get the disk space I want.
I’ve thought about buying a QNAP NAS device, but I’d prefer to NOT have it at home.
That leaves getting a physical server somewhere. But the price is about $100/month. For $1,200/year, it seems like I should be able to buy my own server and put it in a data center somewhere. Has anyone else out there tackled this sort of problem? How have you overcome it?
[Update 2013-06-23 07:19:22] I’ve been thinking about this, and I think co-location of a server is the only way to go. That is the ONLY way to guarente that my data isn’t shared with anyone. Sure, the police could come in and take the server…but I could set it up so the disks are encrypted and can’t be read without a password. Going this route would also let me get rid of:
- Hosting: $13/month
- VPN: $55/year
- Flickr: $25/year
- Amazon Music: $20/year (+20 GB Storage)
It would let me get (with no known men-in-the-middle):
- email done on my own server
- cloud storage
- Contact/Calendar synching across devices without Google
- Secure telephony (asterisk with zrtp)
- Off-site backup (with loads of space)
I think my plan is going to be to set this stuff up at home, see if I can do it, then decide from there what to do.
Image from amy nievera via flickr