Question
Storing backup files for personal archival purposes
- Posted January 10, 2015
I am thinking of signing up for your hosting service but I wanted to ask first if I would be able to store files on the server that I am storing primarily for backup purposes. For example, I would like to save some of my mp3 albums, videos, and other content so that I may retrieve them at anytime. These are all legally acceptable files I have the rights to as an owner and would like to archive in an off-site storage for redundancy purposes as part of my fair use rights over content I own. (While this would have seemed like a silly question to me a while ago, I am asking because my current hosting service, Dreamhost, has switched to a policy whereby its users are no longer allowed to use their servers for anything other than pure web hosting. I can only assume that they see profit opportunities to make money by contextually classifying content stored on their servers since they offer additional plans for archival purposes now. As one of their oldest customers - over 10 tens - I have stayed with them through thick and thin but I cannot tolerate such bald greed so I am now shopping for a new service. I am using this feature as a sort of litmus test of the service before diving deeper.)
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Greetings. I am also a refugee from DreamHost, who now uses DigitalOcean for all webhosting (but for different reasons than you).
Having said that, DreamHost does have a really great fee for DreamObjects storage. DreamObjects buckets can be mounted on your DigitalOcean droplet as a folder.
This gives you virtually unlimited storage for pennies per GB. Also, as far as I understand it, there are not limitations on DreamObjects like there are on DreamHost’s web-hosting plans…so basically you can store whatever you want.
I wrote up a tutorial on how to mount a bucket:
https://firefli.de/tutorials/s3fs-and-dreamobjects.html
But if you really hate DreamHost, you can do the same thing with Amazon storage…but they are a tad more expensive
My total bill for last month from Dreamhost for backing up 7 different websites on a daily basis: $0.70
Thanks for the link and your thoughts. I can’t see anything on the legal side (left) that prohibits archiving as such. I use dropbox for active things but I’d rather pay less per byte to archive stuff that I may want at some point down the road but, in the meantime, just know where to find it and that it’s ok. Beyond that, though, I’d want to actually host a bunch of web sites - the archival thing is just a secondary feature I’ve always used.
The terms of agreement link has the plain english on the right side and the legal jargon on the left side of the page. It’s a standard looking agreement that most members in this public forum glanced at and agreed to when we signed up. You’ll probably want to concentrate on section 2.
From your usage, though, I would think you would want something like a Dropbox for storage, as oppose to a VPS. The former is more of a turn-key system, while the latter requires more involvement (and more fun from my techie perspective).