Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

dorktech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#41

Post by shocks »

runjake wrote: post #19

> OwnCloud is basically Dropbox, without the data limits and pricing restrictions. There's some pretty huge caveats in the above statement from the article. I switched to ownCloud for a while and then switched back to Dropbox. I switched back to Dropbox for a couple reasons. First, ownCloud is written in PHP and the code (and the plugins you could add on) looked pretty janky. The UI was better than the usual open sou…

If your very first reason for not using ownCloud is "because it's written in PHP" then I'm probably not going to read the rest of your comment.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#44

Post by jmcqk6 »

shocks wrote: post #41
runjake wrote: post #19

> OwnCloud is basically Dropbox, without the data limits and pricing restrictions. There's some pretty huge caveats in the above statement from the article. I switched to ownCloud for a while and then switched back to Dropbox. I switched back to Dropbox for a couple reasons. First, ownCloud is written in PHP and the code (and the plugins you could add on) looked pretty janky. The UI was better than the usual open sou…

If your very first reason for not using ownCloud is "because it's written in PHP" then I'm probably not going to read the rest of your comment.

That's too bad. You missed out on some good points. Avoiding something because of the programming language can be a very reasonable decision. Personally, I could probably hack on some PHP if I really needed to, but I want to avoid putting myself in a position to need to do that. There are other options available that are better for me.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#45

Post by coldtea »

aabalkan wrote: post #38

Getting hostgator HTTP 500. (why the f k in the world someone chooses hostgator as their error page) I am quite suprised how people are so successful at not handling Hacker News load? Even my $5 handled #1 on HN for hours with %0.1 CPU load.

Or you know, they could not care less.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#46

Post by coldtea »

q3k wrote: post #39
orjan wrote: post #6

One aspect that is overlooked here is the actual safety of your data. If you feel that your own server has the safety and backup resources of e.g. Amazon (which Dropbox uses), you're probably deluding yourself.

Amazon might have worse safety and backup resources that you might've been led to think.

Well, given that thousands of big companies use AWS, and millions of users rely on them, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#47

Post by jaredstenquist »

I've been trying for days to get OwnCloud working properly with for my 30 person startup. I wish I could say it was going great but I'm a couple hours away from trying out DropBox for business.

I went with Ubuntu, 200GB EBS, M1X-large and the latest OwnCloud (6.0.1 stable)

Syncing has been brutal. We have a 100MB connection, and even the few test users I've put on it all are complaining of it not consistently syncing. Additionally there is no LAN Sync like Dropbox, so you're paying for all the bandwidth.

Since i't at somewhere between $250-300 for OwnCloud and it's been working so poorly, the $450/month for Dropbox isn't looking as bad.

It's a shame. There is good potential here, but as others mentioned the UI is really janky, and it doesn't consistently work as expected.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#48

Post by Touche »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #44
shocks wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your very first reason for not using ownCloud is "because it's written in PHP" then I'm probably not going to read the rest of your comment.

That's too bad. You missed out on some good points. Avoiding something because of the programming language can be a very reasonable decision. Personally, I could probably hack on some PHP if I really needed to, but I want to avoid putting myself in a position to need to do that. There are other options available that are better for me.

It's a weird criticism given that Dropbox is proprietary, you can't modify it even if it is pristine code.

Re: Why I Dropped Dropbox and got OwnCloud

#49

Post by jaredstenquist »

rayanm wrote: post #20

I was also looking to host my own cloud service. I tried OwnCloud (2 weeks ago) and I was fascinated by it... Well until it failed me and lost my test data. There is a major bug in it (try renaming a directory by changing one letter from small to capital). That being said, I started using BitTorrentSync which is a peer to peer sync and I am happy with it so far and I am still testing it.

I've experienced the same bugs. Also using underscores, or asterisk breaks everything silently. No error or attempt to tell you not to do it.
Post reply on HN