Server in cloud - recommendations?
 

One of the very small offices I work with wants to get rid of its onsite server and move exclusively to a cloud-based solution.

It needs to be easy to use for nontechies, reliable, conform to EU & French data storage regulations, and hopefully not be too expensive. The current onsite server contains only about 35 GB of data.

Do you have any specific recommendations or any advice on what to look for when searching for a cloud-based server service?

What do you need to do on the server? File storage, collaboration, email, etc? Server is a very generic term!

Good question!

• File storage above all, with files and documents accessible from anywhere.
• Collaboration would be a plus but I'm not sure if things are that advanced yet; they've only just discovered the ability to share documents on Google.
• Email is handled through the web hosting company (which we're not entirely thrilled with, either, but that's another issue, I think).

Thank you for asking. As I said, there are no real techies involved (including me), so it's hard to even know what questions to ask and what details are important.

Not what you're looking for, as the software provided is more basic and won't meet your needs (although you could build something on top of this that would), but I host a couple of servers with GANDI and highly recommend them. Their prices are reasonable (if not the cheapest), they are an EU (French/Luxembourg) company -- with both US and EU datacenters; I host out of their US one -- and the quality of their service is by far the best I've found for small customers.

If you had a techy on staff, or were willing to hire a consultant, renting a virtual server on GANDI's EU data center and then deploying OwnCloud to it (or OwnCloud + a separate collaboration tool, like Confluence) sounds like pretty much exactly what you want.

35GB isn't much data, and paid yearly, you're probably looking at under 20 Euros a month.

How about using Google Docs?

Or finding a nice hosted Sharepoint service.

Or maybe Office365?

For a simple group use, Google Docs is probably the easiest way forward.

Goggle Docs or Office 365 would be my recommendation.

Google Apps for Business starts at $5/user/mo. and offers email, Google Drive/Docs (30GB of free space, expandable up to 16TB), Google Calendar, etc. It's been a great solution for my small business, mainly because it allows us to collaborate on Word documents either locally in Word or over the Web in Google Docs.

I'm surprised no one else has suggested Dropbox, although it doesn't include online collaboration tools and is much pricier than Google. IMO it's definitely the best file-syncing tool.

I would avoid hosting your own server at all costs, it will be anything but easy for non-techies.

Dropbox for Teams and Google Drive are OK, but I find that Google Drive is very confusing to many people. I personally don't think Google Drive has a very good interface and I very much dislike Google Docs.

My recommendation would be Box. It's $15/user per month - so it isn't exactly the cheapest thing out there. But the collaboration tools are phenomenal, and users can store all their documents directly on their machines and upload like Dropbox, great versioning support, and it can be configured to be seamless for those that aren't tech savvy.

Installing the Google Drive Sync app on your PC/laptop makes the use of Drive quite painless. Drag a document to the drive folder and a few seconds later it's shared with your team. You can control who has access to the folders and files by right clicking and selecting Google Drive from the context menu. The files are still stored locally as well, so you can get at them even while offline; your changes will be synced the next time you connect.

The app occasionally has a hiccup where it causes high CPU utilization (mostly when there's been a network interruption of some sort). Quitting and restarting the app fixes it, though.

I'd stay away from Office 365. The Web Apps are perfectly fine, but being stuck with SkyDrive Pro (or whatever they're calling it now) or SharePoint Online to manage your shared docs is not particularly pleasant. If you also moved your mail to it, that might start to change the tune a little bit.

I also have to caution you... before moving to a cloud solution, make sure it is in fact up to serving the needs of the business. Usability is one thing... users certainly demand usability these days... but other needs are often overlooked, such as access control. In the past, I've seen teams go rogue and decide they didn't like the company's SharePoint or file servers and were going to start using something like Dropbox on their own... then went running to IT six months later when the team leader was terminated and they were trying to figure out how to keep all those team documents in the folders he owned accessible to his team but revoke his access. As you move to the cloud, the most important thing is to ensure you're retaining the amount of control that you need to have over your own (and potentially your customer) data.

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. I am a user of Office 365 for another job and am not sure that would necessarily work well for this group.

Right now the main concern is data storage. I'll look into some of your suggestions in more detail over the next few days and see what looks like a good fit.

I appreciate your input!

I have Dropbox, which I use a lot because my team uses it. And I use Google Drive as we are a Google Apps based company. And I use ownCloud because I can do whatever I want there, there is no cost really, as I already have the colocated server. They all have their strengths.

There are also very cool solutions such as routers that allow you to have a hard drive on them that can be accessed from anywhere, and bittorrent sync.

You should look at bittorrent sync as it is free and may do everything you need, and you can run it on your existing computer(s).

I use Wuala (by the French company LaCie) mainly because of their strong client side encryption fonctionality. In your case, is the security of the data a big concern?

http://www.wuala.com/fr/business/