16 Jul 09 I don’t trust anyone’s cloud either. Screw it, I’ll run my own.

These days, pretty much everyone has their entire life online. Between Flickr and YouTube, plus other services like Google Docs and Gmail, everyone assumes there’s no reason to store anything offline anymore. But when some of the major players in the cloud computing space like Amazon S3, Google and Wordpress suffer downtime….more than once, it’s gotta make you wonder if the Internet-addicted public can deal with momentarily losing access to their precious data.

I spend a lot of hours online on a daily basis. Seeing as how I run an Internet Service Provider, it’s somewhat of a requirement I guess. Depsite this, I don’t use Google Docs, Flickr, YouTube or any of their clones to store my data online. I don’t recall ever making a conscious decision to stay away from them but never saw the need as it would mean that I have to login to umpteen different sites to access all of my data. If I keep it all on my workstation, with the magic of Remote Desktop and a broadband Internet connection, I can get to everything from just about anywhere.

But what about sharing the files with other people? Like sharing pictures of my kids with family? What about accessing my documents and Excel files without launching up my RDP client?

Instead of uploading all of my crap to all of these different sites online, I’ve decided to just setup my own dedicated server in our datacenter and run my own cloud. It’s pretty impractical for most people to do this, what with colocation space and server infrastructure being somewhat less of a commodity and all. But screw it….I’m not “most people”.

More to come later. I’ll do some homework on what apps/scripts I can use for Flickr-like functionality on my own server and post the results here for public consumption.