This is a brief, but long owed post. Last year, I decided that the best path to claim ownership of my data was self-hosting Nextcloud.1 I faced some issues using Hetzner’s 1 vCPU plan and I convinced myself that the culprit was their vCPU not being powerful enough.2 If it’s true that their vCPU wasn’t as powerful as Vultr’s one. It’s also true that with the right know-how I would be able to debug the issue and make things work. The culprit was in fact my lack of knowledge. Read more...

In the process of self-hosting Nextcloud the first step was to choose a VPS provider. It wasn’t a straightforward choice and in the process I ended up experiencing, by this order, Hetzner, DigitalOcean and Vultr. But, first of all, let me advise you that this isn’t intended to be a factual analysis, supported by quantifiable and specific data. It is rather a subjective assessment based on my use case. Therefore, I believe that your experience with these providers could be completely different. If you are into more technical and detailed analyses you can go here and here, for example. Read more...

Since a few years now I started to get concern with how much of my data was being gathered and how it was being used. Nowadays we spend a big part of our lives online and over the years companies have grown basing their business on tracking our actions. The searches we made, the sites and pages we visit, the time you spent on them… and so on. Let’s face it, Google Search was a revolution, and Gmail, OneDrive, iCloud, Facebook or Youtube are excellent products in terms of usability and features. And best of all they’re free, you would say. Are they? Read more...