Promoting hosting providers

Would be great if all providers could get such a good presentationā€¦

cc @jospoortvliet

I offered in the provider newsletter twice now that anyone who sends me content for a blog can get it published. Sadly, only a few have done so.

:wink:

Great news! Let me see if I can come up with something. Any specific content, or just ā€œsell sell sell, we are the bestā€ type of blog post? :wink: :slight_smile:

Well, it has to be a bit more objective of course. You should present yourself, talk about your history, goals etc, how many customers you have, what you offer and especially what makes you special, different. Why should people pick you over one of the other 50 providers. So generic stuff like ā€˜we are awesomeā€™ is not very useful, specific things like ā€œwe have a Swiss data center buried deep under the highest mountain protected by attack dogs to keep your data safeā€ is relevant and useful.

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@jospoortvliet Thanks for sorting that out.

I will write something and let you know. :slight_smile:

What I still donā€™t understand with NextCloud cloud hosting, and hopefully somebody can enlighten me on this:

How is oneā€™s data safe for the intelligence services and their friends if they request a copy of your files (and hack your password, or use a vulnerability theyā€™ve found thatā€™s not been found and fixed by the community)?

I donā€™t feel safe keeping my data on a companyā€™s server outside of my control, wether itā€™s NextCloud, owncloud etc etc.

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If sensitive data is stored on a third party server, then client-side encryption is the only way to go. The objective of Nextcloud is more about not having to go with for example a US-based provider, where providers like Google, Microsoft and so on work with the NSA etc. and no real privacy/data protection laws exist.

Other than that, Nextcloud makes it at least possible to run a number of services (files/calendar/contacts/video conferences/ā€¦) packaged into one system on-premises.

In the end it is always just a question about how much you trust anybody.

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Well, depends on what government youā€™re afraid of. If youā€™re fine with the privacy laws in, say, Switzerland, it makes sense to pick a Swiss provider.

Of course, if you want 100% control, self-hosting is the only way to go. Or as @alfred said - client side encryption.

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Thanks for the replies. It confirms what I thought. Iā€™ve got nothing to hide, but will take the above in consideration.

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Privacy isnā€™t about that in any case, this is a straw man argument often used against privacy protection rules.

I can (and frequently do) give a speech about that :wink:

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No thanks to such advertisments, What direction is NC going, getting more and more corporate and evil? Why should I trust a provider with spammy texts like these? Where are independent reviews and customer feed back? Do you seriously think I trust testimonials on the companysā€™ own website? You can do better Nextcloud!

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I also prefer to see all reacting providers side by side than advertising presentation of one, for whatever it done for it.

Otherwise clearly mark the topic as ā€œadvertisingā€ and we know what we are going for ;).

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:smiley: for announcing a new cloud host? Calm down; this is an open offer to any cloud host that comes on board as he mentioned above:

If you want to seek external reviews, do so. The content is host-provided so is undoubtedly going to be biased.

Well, it isnā€™t paid for by anyone - we just offer the hosters an option to present themselves to the Nextcloud community, that is all this is. Iā€™ll add a note in front of the article about that.

And reviews - well, people can post here :wink:

Maybe we should set up a forum category for feedback about hosting providers so people can discuss there. What do you think?

Edit: ok, so there is already the hosting category: šŸ—ƒļø Hosting providers - Nextcloud community

Maybe we could set up a poll for ā€˜best hosterā€™ but itā€™ll be 50 hosters long :wink:

:wink:

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Generally the idea of providing information about available hosting providers here in the forum is a good idea. E.g. there could be a maintained overview topic with objective information about services, location, pricing, etc. inside a table or something an then a link to a separate topic for each provider where those can present themselves, questions can be asked and answered. Fore interested/possible customers this could be a less binding place to inform themselves, than using the providers contact ways. Also, as it is opened to everybody, this could lead to an additional Q&A list, which also might be helpful for the providers to consider and add into their own portals.

I just had a look at the hosting category: "Topics about hosting Nextcloud, either on your own servers, in the cloud, or with specific hosting services."
Sounds like for the idea it could be worth to set up a new category especially for and about service providers.

Hehe, this belongs to ā€œmetaā€ now actually to keep this topic clean for CiviHosting :stuck_out_tongue:. Maybe someone can split.

Have you seen the forums? Itā€™s already category jungle out there :wink:
Hosting doesnā€™t get much use at the moment; I donā€™t see a need to add more categoriesā€¦

Ya this is also trueā€¦

On the other hand the ā€œhostingā€ category could become obsolete by this. For topics about self-hosting, including hardware questions, the ā€œinstallationā€ is used most. I guess the initial intention was to use ā€œinstallationā€ just for (software) installation and distro related questions, while hosting goes more to the hardware direction, including hosting providers.

As software, distro and hardware related questions often going hand in hand, this could be merged into a ā€œself-hostingā€ category, while keeping everything about provided hosting separate, including the special installation related questions, going along with limited rights, missing terminal access etc.

But yeah, in the end it is always hard to separate categories clearly for everybody and make people also use them just as intended. And throwing everything around might make things worse instead of better :smile: .

The idea above was just to create a more ordered, objective looking place for hosting providers to present themselves, as the first comments on the presentation of CiviHosting were about the impression of ā€œunfairā€ advertising by nextcloud, instead about CiviHosting itself, which is also sort of ā€œunfairā€ into the other direction.

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We could rename ā€˜hostingā€™ to ā€˜hosting providersā€™ā€¦ I think that that is what meant, anyhow. Or at least, should be meant, as you point out we have installation etc handling self hosting.

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Simple and reasonable, as long as we do not hurt someones different ordering idea :slight_smile:.

I donā€™t think theyā€™re used enough to worry too much. But the sticky topics will need an edit to reflect the changes too!