Thanks for bringing this up, now I will add my own recent experience here.
I was in a dilemma.
A couple of years ago I bought a Christmas Special Offer version of a VPS, that is quite different from the usual VPS offers that are offered by the provider I prefer to use. It’s one that generally has more overall power, but in turn has other things missing, like e.g. a decently sized storage medium. It only has 80GB, if I remember correctly.
After using that VPS for so much time, I eventually hit that 78GB used disk space mark. Well, luckily it’s not like a real disk, where 90% used space is already very critical.
Still – it was clear, I needed an expansion.
So the first thing, that usually comes to mind is just plugging in another disk into one of my Raspberry Pis and mount that in the VPS. Sure, sounds great and easy in theory, but in practice it won’t suffice my expectations.
The point of using a VPS is its nearly indisruptable availability. Since I started the VPS a couple years ago, when I bought it, it literally has never rebooted ever. It’s running since then and it’s running strong.
Whole different story with my Raspberry Pis. There is a power outage about once a year. Things need to be set up tediously again to work and be available. Then, I sometimes screw up internet stuff, e.g. due to the re-plugging of the router or something like that (my previous router was quite unstable, after using it for so many years).
Other times I do something “harmless” on my Raspberry Pi and then I suddenly need to restore a backup.
So, the point is, it seems easy and cheap at first, but on the second thought, it’s just not as reliable and I don’t want to freak out with high availability shit or whatever, just to have a bit more storage on my VPS. It’s just not worth it, for me.
Additionally, even if I would deal with all that tediousness and annoyance, I still would have an issue, which I can’t control: internet connection. Even if I do everything the best way possible, I cannot stop the internet to disconnect from time to time. It’s just how private internet for personal use works. Not to mention the whole dynamic DNS situation…
So, long story short, I decided I needed reliable online storage, that is 99.9999% of the time reliably online and available. It does not have to be fast. I’m patient with such things. I’m also very patient with down- and uploads. I just need the damn reliability. If I want to download something from my VPS, I want it now and not after I get home and fix the server crap, or whatever.
I’ve been looking and looking for online storage. All I wanted is at least 1TB online storage! Nothing special! I literally just want online storage that just is available all the time. I don’t care about speed or how many cores and RAM the storage provides.
The first offer I’ve looked at is at the Storage VPS offers from the provider I’m already on, anyway. I was shocked by the prices, because the cheapest 1TB option literally costs 3 times more than my current VPS solution, just because it has more storage.
Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous and I was under the impression that was just a fluke for whatever reason. Perhaps they just weren’t interested in selling this, so they put up the price intentionally high.
Then, of course, I’ve looked at my favourite cloud storage provider – MEGA.
I love this provider, as I already pointed out many times in this forum (sorry for that), but, as I said, I just need more space. No fancy shit. No features. I literally just need a bucket to throw in digital data. That’s it!
I find the prices MEGA offers its services for, fairly reasonable. At least, if you are fully using all the encryption stuff and all the features and all the magnificient bells and whistles MEGA has to offer. I fully understand the pricing and if I would use all that, I would certainly pay for it. But… I don’t need it. I just need more storage. That’s literally it.
So, I’ve been looking all around the internet for all kinds of storage and it annoyed the crap out of me, that all services advertised features of this and that, when I just needed more storage! I do not care if your storage VPS has 4 CPU cores! I JUST NEED MORE STORAGE!
Now, the only services that are obvious to IT people and yet have no consumer-focused bells and whistles are all the S3 like bucket solutions, like all the Amazon AWS clones. So, this would have been pretty nice… Except.
They are for professional use mostly and therefore have only prices in the professional range. I won’t pay hundreds of bucks a year for 1TB storage. No way.
I was pretty desperate, to be honest, and I was indeed reconsidering to use my own storage, because I just didn’t seem to find an online storage provider of any kind, that just gives me cheap storage at a reasonable price, without bells and whistles I would otherwise need to pay for, even though I wouldn’t even ever use them in the first place.
Now, after all this time, I found something.
You have to really look for the pricing to be able to find it (at least some time ago that was the case):
https://icedrive.net/plans
First thing I’ve checked were the Trustpilot reviews about this company’s service. Literally all the people leaving negative reviews didn’t know what they were doing and they were all at fault themselves, in my opinion. It usually went like this “I didn’t know how this storage thing works, so I still used it, then it broke. You are dumb!”.
Second thing is the pricing…
They have reasonably priced LIFETIME plans! Pay once, keep using it.
This is precisely my thing. I don’t like renting shit, except there is a good reason for it, like e.g. renting a VPS.
I wondered the whole time, how they are dealing with a lifetime plan, but it turns out a lifetime plan is basically like renting it for at least 3 years. So, I guess, their calculations resulted from a reasonable train of thought. Perhaps they will increase the prices years later, for new customers, anyway.
This provider seemed to offer everything I wanted:
A cheap online storage solution, without bells and whistles I would need to pay for. It’s literally just for uploading and downloading stuff. Exactly what I wanted.
Now the only doubt remaining was the accessability.
I wasn’t sure if I was able to use the service in a GUI-less CLI-only environment. Their app spoke like “I’m GUI only” and they didn’t seem to have a CLI solution, like e.g. MEGA offers the excellent MEGA CLI.
So, before buying, I searched and searched but didn’t find a way. I was already doubting, if I have to drop this one, but…
https://icedrive.net/help/account/does-icedrive-support-webdav
Boom, we get accessilibity options through an established standard.
I’ve never used WebDAV really that much before, so it was a bit of a new place for me.
Setting it up the first time with RClone was very annoying, since I ran into a lot of errors. Almost all the errors are simply because of the fact that RClone’s documentation is lacking tons of information. Sure, if you know how to use RClone and are familiar with it anyway, the documentation is enough. However, if you are new to using it and aren’t even familiar with how WebDAV works with RClone, you can run into trouble, especially since most people do not use WebDAV with RClone, as they usually use one of the pre-built-in solutions for different cloud providers.
So, that’s actually the major part of the story, but I won’t iterate over all the details of how I finally got it to work.
Let me just show you the result of my work:
Apparently, nobody uses Icedrive through WebDAV. I feel like I’m a pioneer with Icedrive.
This was one of the motivations to build a solution like the above one.