Ok so there is this amazing nextcloud provider called armored.net. They offered 20Gb of free storage and one-time payment plans for storage instead of monthly/yearly plans. They are a very new provider but over the past few weeks many people, including me noticed our storage capacity was shrinking by the day. I had 1TB of storage which has fallen under 2GB over time and armored was aware of this and tried to solve the issue.
Armored got more storage and to what I understand was trying to upgrade nextcloud to a newer version but was unable to unless they were a nextcloud partner. So my questions are, can nextcloud help them out? What is a nextcloud partener? Is it really hard or impossible to upgrade a nextcloud version? And is this shrinking storage glitch a big issue on nextcloud.
Probably. They posted a issue on GitHub or here? I was not aware of such a active community on reddit but someone from Nextcloud seems to be the moderator. Butās probably not the best place for support. Could anyone with a reddit account ask them what issue (on GitHub) they are talking about?
Nextcloud partners Partners are companies building a business around or with Nextcloud. For example they are managing Nextcloud for their customers. I donāt know what āhave the full backing of Nextcloud GmbHā means but I suspect that partners have access to support from Nextcloud GmbH. Itās okay if a company like armored.net builds a service based on Nextcloud without beeing a partner but they canāt expect any āpriorityā help from anyone.
At least I would interpret their above statement like that. I see that situation with many open source products. People start using it because itās āfreeā and figure out later that āfreeā also does not include any kind of support. Thatās okay for my personal use and probably for a lot of other people too but if you decide to run a business based on that software that might be bad.
I donāt think so.
Our initial technology choice of @Nextcloud turned out to be a poor choice due to lack of support without paying to be a 'partnerā. Our migration to fully opensource, super-fast and no-nonsense #BeDrive is complete.
This ācompanyā looks very unprofessional if it is a company at all. From what I see from @trymeout description, their problem was overselling (since they clearly ran out of space on server) without any plan on how they would deal with such scenario and they expected free support from Nextcloud because they understand āopensource=FREEā. Obviously they didnāt even bother to read anything, otherwise they would be aware of what partnership is and what benefits does it bring (and what is the pricing for it) and they would also know that you donāt have to be a partner if you want to host Nextcloud on your infrastructure.
There are also some other things which immediately raise red flags (only my opinion):
beside half working website, there is no concrete and verifiable information about their company (why are they hiding it?),
they were selling one-time payment plans - no matter what the price was, how are they planning to finance these plans in long term? To keep service running it involves certain costs and in long term it just doesnāt seem as feasible option for a company. It reminds me kind of like ponzi schemeā¦
being a partner to do the migration or an upgrade??? Or is it just a very poor excuse for their lack of competence and knowledgeā¦ Its up to you to decideā¦ For some company which provides me a service (which I paid for!), I would expect way more then excuses and blaming othersā¦
https://armored.net/ and https://bedrive.vebto.com/ looks very similar. I guess they are using BeDrive - File Sharing and Cloud Storage by Vebto | CodeCanyon. Looks pretty cool to me actually. If you need a file sharing only solution without synchronization that might be enough. But I donāt see how that software is open source in a open source meaning. You still have to buy it first and then at least the code is not obfuscated but thatās not open source
Indeed very sad. Good to see they are using a different software now.
From what I understand they had their own encryption wrapper added to armored.net so they cannot see their customers files. This maybe part of the reason why they had trouble upgrading?
Probably You have to ask them about that. Without a qualified report at GitHub we can only guess. And even a qualified issue report does not mean someone is able to reproduce their problem.
@trymeout: I donāt think that would be the case. If they did this, they would need know Nextcloud really really well, because they would have to change the code in order to achieve this and make it work for their clients at the same time. Even if they managed to do this, why do they blame Nextcloud encryption then, they should have excellent understanding of Nextcloud encrypion. Also in such case, I donāt think Nextcloud team would be able to help them if they made something on their own.
armored.net looks like some teenager had a flash about being a hosting provider and managed to install Nextcloud and until it was running fine, everything was ok. As soon as problem occurred, they were lost and didnāt know how to manage the problem. It is clear they ran out of disk space and they were not able to resolve the issue as it would be expected for some company (on their own). They simply turned to developer of the software and expected free help. And since they didnāt get it, they started to blame Nextcloud team (the easiest way redirect the attention).
Sadly, Iāve seen many companies which just expect to do business the easy way, expect free āservicingā from others and blame everybody else if some issue occurs. They are never to be blamed. Now they quickly found BeDrive to replace Nextcloud, but Nextcloud is light years ahead of BeDrive. I really wonder how will their clients accept this āreplacementā for the price they have already paid. And not to mention the time their service wasnāt really usableā¦
Open source software generally does not get better by people complaining. Instead of blaming others, there is a chance to make a difference yourself by contributing.
You can get support for āfreeā like here in the community but it requires that there are people helping each other out with similar setups. Or improve documentation, adding features they didnāt findā¦
Moving a setup can be tricky especially when encryption is enabled. Iād use a test setup to test it first before doing it in a productive environment. Others already commented about the company itself. We shouldnāt waste any more time on them.
You have to ask them about that. Without a qualified report at GitHub we can only guess. And even a qualified issue report does not mean someone is able to reproduce their problem.