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Privacy comes at a price. Maybe you could host at a friends place or rent a physical server. If you think about asymmetric internet connections there are many

Privacy comes at a price. Maybe you could host at a friends place or rent a physical server. If you think about asymmetric internet connections there are many reasons it is the way it is but few of them are good reasons. To contrast this, Google fiber offers symmetric connections with 1 GBit/s upload speed which could change the game for some lucky people. But even with your current connection, if you mostly have low bandwidth content like text/notekeeping and small documents you should try it. There is no good reason to store private notes and documents in the cloud.

dikaiosune 11y ago
Sure, privacy comes at a price, but projects like Sandstorm are (at least in part) aimed at reducing that price relative to the large-scale SaaS services. I've looked into a physical colo, but there isn't one in the town/city where I'm from and it'd be a minimum 2.5 hour drive to the closest site. Unfortunately re: hosting at a friend's house, a small-ish city like mine doesn't have anyone in it other than large businesses who have decent upload. And that's a big reason why I'm still on Gmail, Dropbox, Wunderlist, etc. -- the cost to self-host is just a little too high. For me, as attractive as I find the idea of proper privacy, the price is almost there but not quite low enough. I look forward to a future where I have access to a symmetric fiber connection -- but that will require either a decade of development where I'm from or a move to a more metropolitan area (the latter is not out of the question, of course). In the meantime I have plans to evaluate a bunch of different self-hosted SaaS options on DigitalOcean in the next few months.
- static_noise 11y ago
  It's an interesting problem. We don't trust big corporations. Hosting ourselves is very expensive. How could this be organized better? 10 people hosting a small server infrastructure together? Can you trust them? I believe that sandstorm is making the move very much into the right direction. Self hosting will become cheaper and more convenient. In a few years you can drop some little server box off at two friends places and colocate for them and each one will have their own private cluster. With the storage encrypted, of course. Setting this up will just require doing the handshake between the servers and between the servers and clients and done.

dikaiosune 11y ago

Sure, privacy comes at a price, but projects like Sandstorm are (at least in part) aimed at reducing that price relative to the large-scale SaaS services. I've looked into a physical colo, but there isn't one in the town/city where I'm from and it'd be a minimum 2.5 hour drive to the closest site. Unfortunately re: hosting at a friend's house, a small-ish city like mine doesn't have anyone in it other than large businesses who have decent upload. And that's a big reason why I'm still on Gmail, Dropbox, Wunderlist, etc. -- the cost to self-host is just a little too high. For me, as attractive as I find the idea of proper privacy, the price is almost there but not quite low enough. I look forward to a future where I have access to a symmetric fiber connection -- but that will require either a decade of development where I'm from or a move to a more metropolitan area (the latter is not out of the question, of course). In the meantime I have plans to evaluate a bunch of different self-hosted SaaS options on DigitalOcean in the next few months.

static_noise 11y ago
It's an interesting problem. We don't trust big corporations. Hosting ourselves is very expensive. How could this be organized better? 10 people hosting a small server infrastructure together? Can you trust them? I believe that sandstorm is making the move very much into the right direction. Self hosting will become cheaper and more convenient. In a few years you can drop some little server box off at two friends places and colocate for them and each one will have their own private cluster. With the storage encrypted, of course. Setting this up will just require doing the handshake between the servers and between the servers and clients and done.