Sure, you can build your own Dropbox. All you need is cheap drives, right? Seriously, there is a place for the cloud, and keeping your operations there. And th

Sure, you can build your own Dropbox. All you need is cheap drives, right? Seriously, there is a place for the cloud, and keeping your operations there. And there is also a place for running everything yourself. You just have to be brutally honest with yourself and everyone else about what ALL the costs are, both monetary and otherwise, before you make that decision. In the end, I think many people who go the self-hosted route actually have a much higher TCO than if they used the cloud. Yes, their monetary costs might go up substantially, but there are also non-monetary costs that I think would go down substantially. And I think the latter usually tend to outweigh the former. Of course, one thing that you have to do when operating in the cloud is to make sure you keep a close eye on all those costs. The price of freedom is perennial vigilance. And there's a 24x7x365 cost to be paid for perennial vigilance.