I wanted to try Nextcloud recognize and memories apps in an environment outside of my main Nextcloud hosted environment. I had a few requirements:
- US based
- Less than $20 / mo
- Reasonable amount of storage
- Quick setup of the apps to get working quickly
- Responsive support if I ran into issues
So I saw that they had a special for ~$6/mo that would work.
Their website advertises:
- 24/7 Responsive Customer Support (Per plans, 6 hr response time)
- Quick and Painless Setup Process (Nice because I wanted to do this proof of concept quickly)
- 1TB - More than enough
Their sign up process was smooth. Within a few hours I had access to an instance. I installed the recognize and memories apps. Had some issues with errors. (Typical with NC) - Reached out to support and had it resolved the same day. Nice.
Loaded about 8 years worth of family photos, a little at a time.
Learned a lot about recognize and memories apps. Not all they are cracked up to be. No way to add people to images that are not detected by recognize (5 people in the image and recognize only picked up 2). Without this, testing over, game over. Insufficient tagging is a non-starter.
Summary below if you want to skip the details.
But I had invested so much time in tagging what I could, I wanted to at least get a backup of the database. A capability I had not considered that I would need when I signed up. No way to do this from their client area interface. So I reached out to support on May 2 requesting to know how I could backup the database on my own. May 5, Dale responded back, “Please try using the Nextcloud import/export app in the store.” - No such app that was supported in the current version. I replied on the same day asking for guidance. May 12, Dale responsed, “We can provide with a database dump every once in a while if you would like that.”. Same day, I responded and said that would be fine. May 19, they uploaded the backup to sendit.sh site that I wasn’t familar with. I had been out of town and responded back on May 22 that the site was giving me a 404 error when trying to download. May 22 they confirmed that the site only holds files for 24 hours and that they would re-upload. I asked for updates 3 times and they got back to me on June 3, “We will get an database backup over to you at some point today.”. I asked for 3 updates three more times. June 9 they said they sent links and to check spam. Nothing in spam. I created a share on my NC and asked them to upload it into the folder. June 11, they uploaded it to another NC and gave me a link to download. Downloaded a ~180mb db backup.
In summary, the Librecloud support was pretty bad. 6 hour SLA, hardly. I just don’t think they do this for a regular job. More of like a side-hustle. Their SLA was about 6 days. I really wasn’t asking for anything crazy. A database backup. That’s all. It took over a month. A task that should take less than an hour. I currently use cloudamo, and their support is fantastic. I don’t mind paying $23/mo for that level of service. I had librecloud from April 16 to June 13. Removed my files and cancelled the service.
Hope this helps our community with my review and experience of Librecloud hosting provider.