Some Noob Questions

[Leo Staley]

Hi. 

My experience level: I've installed things like wordpress, dokuwiki, owncloud, and such, via Softaculous and Mojo, and have tinkered with html and css. I feel like I have achieved some measure of success in customizing and using those installed apps too. But Javascript be deep and scary water. Depending on your perspective, I'd put myself between the middle of the beginner class for coding/programing/scripting, and the middle of the intermediate class for general computer and internet stuff. I'm certainly no software hacker, though, on occasion, I can do some serious copy/pasting after some hard googling.  

I've used Box, Sugarsync, DropBox, Google Drive, Whatever-Microsoft's-cloud-is-called-right-now, and Evernote, but REALLY like the idea of having all of my cloud stuff in ONE place, under MY control. (Though, maybe this is too much to ask for at my user level). 

So, Is Cozycloud for me? Perusing the website, I didn't really get a feel for what the user interface would be like, nor how difficult it would be to set it up on my shared hosting plan on, say, Namecheap or Bluehost.  I personally haven't actually spent much time experimenting with owncloud yet either, because I found cozycloud and onecloud around the same time. 

Thanks in advance! 

-Leo

[Mihnea Dobrescu-Balaur]

Hi Leo,

Here's a possible user interface, on the demo website:
https://demo.cozycloud.cc/#home


Best,
Mihnea

--
Mihnea Dobrescu-Balaur

[Terrycloth]

From the way they market themselves on their website, the ownCloud team seems to be focused mainly on being an open source Dropbox or Google Drive replacement -- and it really shows in how they've designed the user interface. Except for the recent addition of web-based ODF office document editing, ownCloud focuses more on the file storage and sharing. Which is fine and good and all. They're good at what they have, and the Document editor makes it also a good replacement for Google Docs and the like.

Cozy works to be a general web/cloud application platform (along with cloud file storage). Cozy is still fairly early in development, though, and while it's getting closer every day, the Android client for Cozy Files is still in beta, and there's no working desktop client yet. It also requires admin privileges to install Cozy on your server. If that doesn't work for your shared web hosting plan, you can get a cloud hosted by Cozy Cloud if you email them.

What I'm doing is I use both. I have both an ownCloud account on my web host, but I also have a Cozy cloud. My plan is to keep an eye on Cozy's development, and switch my full cloud solution to Cozy when it's ready; in the meanwhile, the Cozy note-taking app works better than ownCloud's, plus I get a little extra cloud storage (managed through a web browser, or the beta Android client).

[Frank Rousseau]

Hi Leo,

 Thank you for your email ! Cozy is definitely suited for you. As Terry said, it will require that you rent a VPS, a dedicated server or that you setup Cozy on a box at home. We will be there to assist you. Whatever, if you don't have enough time or don't succeed in setting up your Cozy, we can host one for you.

Thank you Terry for the information about Cozy. One more thing: since Cozy is an application platform, you can expect that it will provide soon much more services than Owncloud/Dropbox/Box/GDrive/...

Regards,

Frank

[Terrycloth]

Cozy Files does have webDAV access, which makes a pretty work around until they finish the desktop clients, so I hope I didn't overstate Cozy not being "ready." I'll be running my own instance of Cozy once I can upgrade my web hosting service so that I have admin privileges.

[Leo Staley]

Ah! So I can't use it on a shared hosting account, like Namecheap or Bluehost? 

[Andrew Toskin]

Leo,
I haven't used either of those web hosts, but some companies will install something for you, if you ask. That would be worth checking. Email your list of potential web hosts and see if they're willing to do it for you.

Otherwise, you'd need to go for Virtual Private Server hosting, collocation hosting, or set up a web server in your own house (which would require getting the "business" or equivalent service from your ISP). These option, unfortunately do cost a little extra.

[Joseph Silvestre]

Hello everybody,

I guess you will find impossible to install Cozy on a shared hosting account because you need a root access to install it (and more generally a ssh access is a comfort you can't avoid for now). I think the easiest way to go for you would be to get a VPS as suggested earlier and run the installation script on it. We'd be happy to help you if something went wrong during installation, just let us know!

@Andrew: thanks for your relevant replies!

Cheers,

Joseph.

[Leo Staley]

That was very helpful. Considering my skill level, money concerns, general requirements and other things, shared hosting is the best solution for me, so cozy won't work for me. Not every program is for everybody. I definitely appreciate all the helpful responses though. 

Keep up the good work, and keep having fun with Cozy! 

Cheers

-Leo