It’s part of a growing trend to replace cent1rally hosted services with those that can be run on servers under an individual or organization’s control in their own legal jurisdictions—and customed to their specific needs.
“As a company, we don’t have any servers—we don’t do any hosting,” says Nextcloud founder and managing director Frank Karlitschek, speaking with Fast Company through his product’s video chat feature. “They put it on whatever hardware or hosting infrastructure they trust.” For a family or couple looking to share files or photos or keep their calendars in sync, that can be something as simple as a the low-cost Raspberry Pi.
The move to the self-hosted cloud isn’t limited to file-sharing tools. Mattermost, a workplace chat tool with features similar to Slack, is designed to be hosted on a company’s private servers, storing chat logs in the company’s databases.
Read more at Fast Company
