build your own cloud

NetworkChuck Technology Careers Career & Money

About this video

NetworkChuck argues for replacing Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive — which he calls ’the triad’ — with a self-hosted cloud, comparing two free options: FileCloud, whose sponsor segment presents it as an enterprise file-sharing product with a free community edition, and Nextcloud, which he presents as the open-source home-lab option. He walks through launching FileCloud on AWS EC2 from a Marketplace image, logging in with the instance ID as the default password, applying the free licence, creating an S3 bucket and an IAM user, and editing cloudconfig.php to switch storage from local to Amazon S3, which he says costs about $0.023 per gigabyte per month for the standard tier. He also shows on-prem installs via Docker, a Linux package and a virtual-machine image, formatting and mounting an external drive for storage, and setting up a domain and SSL through Cloudflare. He highlights FileCloud features he demonstrates such as password-protected shares with expiry and download limits and mounting the cloud as a network drive, contrasts Nextcloud’s Docker install and broader apps, and notes FileCloud community edition is limited to five users while Nextcloud is not.

Key takeaways

Two options compared: FileCloud (enterprise-focused, Windows-installable, 5-user community limit he states) and Nextcloud (open source, Linux-based)
AWS route: launch the FileCloud EC2 image, use the instance ID as the admin password, then apply the free community licence
Move storage to S3 by creating a bucket and IAM user and changing the storage implementation in cloudconfig.php to Amazon S3
FileCloud sharing he demonstrates can password-protect a link, set expiry, and limit the number of downloads; Nextcloud sharing he shows cannot limit downloads
On-prem options include Docker, Linux package and VM image, plus mounting a formatted external drive as the storage path

Episode details: published June 19, 2023 · 47:13 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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