General > General Technical Chat
Eradicating Google from my online life
CJay:
The Youtube ad blocker blocker debacle has tipped me over the edge and I've decided it's high time to get them out of my computers and browsing where possible.
I have become quite reliant on some of their services (email, drive/photos and calendar) which worries me so I want go "back to my roots" and get my own domain, email service and perhaps online storage*.
I was a Demon Internet customer right back at the start, before the web was even really a thing and I really miss the domain name, web hosting and unlimited email addresses they offered but there don't seem to be any ISPs offering reasonable facsimiles of that service (I really miss pre-Thus Demon)
So, ripping open the can of worms, any recommendations from personal experience for a UK/EU based hosting company who can offer me a domain, good, reliable email service (25 or more addresses), cloud storage (let's say 200GB) and maybe a little web hosting for around £5-10 per month?
*online storage might not be that important as I and a couple of family members have just got FTTH 1Gbps broadband at home so I'm playing with the idea of having a couple of NAS like devices located in their homes and mine so we can all back up our data.
ebastler:
I have just moved web hosting to Hetzner and am quite happy so far. Favorable pricing, unlimited traffic, and their administration backend strikes a good balance between flexibility and ease of use (for my taste):
https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting?country=gb
If you want cloud storage, the storage capacities included in the hosting packages are probably too small. They have separate cloud storage packages; I have no experience with these. The difference between the two flavors seems to be that one is meant for just your own use (backups via SFTP, SAMBA etc.), while the other is meant for file sharing:
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
All hosted in Europe (Germany and Finland).
Nominal Animal:
I've used OVH now for almost a decade. The pro web host package seems to tick all your needs; I use the personal one. Aside from occasional email issues when large email services started requiring SPF DNS records (those got resolved, of course; I do now have the necessary and correct SPF DNS TXT record), it has worked quite trouble-free for me. I suspect there are even better deals or smaller companies with similarly good deals out there, but this one is good enough for my needs so I haven't bothered to look.
Squarewave:
I'm thinking of doing the same, to minimise reliance on someone elses services. There are home network servers we can use, with sync apps which will work in the exact way as Google Drive, Google Photos etc. I think it's best to do something like this eventually, for us who can, before we end up paying hundreds of pounds per year for their services.
Microdoser:
I keep reading about this YouTube thing, and adverts on YouTube in general, but I can't say I've noticed. I have a Pi-Hole set up that uses recursive DNS searching so not only do I have a custom blacklist of sites (where the request is stopped before it leaves my home network), my DNS requests don't do through one of the large DNS repositories (another place they harvest data about you).
My advice if you really want to limit the data companies get on you, and also stop a lot of adverts, is to buy a raspberry pi, connect it to your network, then follow this guide :
Regarding an ISP, I have no problems with FastHosts but I am a relatively light user.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version