Seed your own cloud

Google (and its cloud-centric brethren) lure people by the ease with which they make your data omnipresent. Any content that you’ve hosted with Google can be accessed from anywhere on the internet. The downside to this approach, as we’ve been seening, is that you need to trust your data to a corporation’s servers who host it for free with the intention of monetising it by some other means, which exposes you to some sort of privacy intrusion.

At the other end of the spectrum are the rising number of online services that promise to keep your data from prying eyes. We’ve explored many such services in this feature. Unlike Google’s, however, these services cost money.

There is another option that’ll let you have your cake and eat it too. Self-hosting is a popular route taken by many to save their data from the grips of internet monopolies. In the past such options have only really been accessible to uber-geeks who had the skills to poke holes in their firewalls without exposing their home network to the perils of the internet. Open source solutions such as Nextcloud have democratised this knowledge and essentially turned self-hosting into an app that anyone can deploy.

Nextcloud isn’t the only open source self-hosting cloud platform available, but it is surely the most diverse. It offers several deployment options as well as sync clients for all popular desktop and mobile platforms. Nextcloud also has meaningful sharing options with privacy and security in mind. End-to-end encryption and support for popular authentication mechanisms, plus specific permission controls, make it stand out from the competition. On top of that, Nextcloud has an Apps ecosystem that’s flush with a large number of useful official and third-party apps that’ll help you replace many of the popular privacy-intruding online services.