At some point all good things comes to an end. It has been some great and inspiring years, but we have now decided to stop our support for the ownCloud VM due to lack of time, and that we rather promote Nextcloud as we think it’s the better choice.

We will help you migrate to Nextcloud. Click here for more information.

The future is now

A little more than a year ago we wrote a blog post about what we felt, and that we were pretty surprised when Nextcloud became official. This is what we wrote back then:

Tech and Me are, and has been such large contributors to ownCloud, and suddenly it felt like we had to choose. Well, we decided not to choose side in this, and we will continue to serve both sides with contributions and VMs – at least in a distant future.

The distant future is now, and it feels like a logical choice due to reasons we wrote about in the past. The Nextcloud project has become greater than we expected. In just a little more than a year several security improvements have been implemented, the community has grown, and the future feels exiting. No more open Github issues that are old due to lack of attention, and a more community oriented way of thinking which has proven to give results. In short, things gets done. One of the positive side-effects of the open license that Nextcloud use is that it’s easier for developers to create apps, or to commit code in general which in turn has led to that the number of apps just keeps rising, and the barrier for commit PRs is lower.

Still a great alternative

We want to make it clear that ownCloud is not bad. The development is not dead. It’s just that, to us, ownCloud is on another path, and we prefer the other choice. This is our personal opinion, and our intention are not to discard ownCloud in any way. ownCloud is still one of the largest open-source community projects, and one of the enablers to avoid large central cloud soulutions hosted by large corporations that you don’t really know if you can trust with your files. ownCloud is a great alternative, just like Seafile or any other self-hosted cloud solution. It’s actually due to ownCloud – with the people behind ownCloud – that Tech and Me exists.

Epilogue and thanks

Back in 2013 when Daniel (the founder of Tech and Me) were looking into alternatives to Dropbox, ownCloud was one of very few, or maybe even the only solution to host your files on your own server and has been a great inspiration for us, and others. We are very grateful for that. Thank you everyone that made it possible!

We made the ownCloud VM back in 2014 to make it easier for people to switch from Dropbox, Gdrive, Onedrive and similar. We noticed a great interest, and we didn’t count, but without exaggerating we had several thousands of downloads and in the best of ownCloud days we had around 100+ downloads per day. It feels really good to have made the world a little bit better place. Big words you may think, but the more open-source there is, for all the enablers to self-host your data, and the less control the large internet companies have – the world is actually a better place. It gives the freedom of choice, to choose privacy, and the sense of calm to know that you are in control of your own data. We really hope that open-source alternatives like ownCloud, Nextcloud, Seafile and others gets wider attention, not just among people with an interest in IT, but also among people in general. That’s why we contribute as much as we can, but to keep the same quality in multiple projects at the same time is quite time consuming. That’s why ownCloud 10.0.4 will be the last version that we will release as a VM.

final words

If you read the whole post, you now know that we took this decision due to several reasons. Mainly because we feel that we don’t we have time to keep the same quality for both projects, and the path Nextcloud is on suits us better. It will still be possible to get support regarding ownCloud from us, and we will keep everything online that were existing before. All our VMs auto updates upon first boot which means that the published VM for ownCloud will update itself later versions to come. Though we can not guarantee that it will work as the support will end.

Migration from ownCloud to Nextcloud + general support

All existing ownCloud VM users that wants to migrate to Nextcloud can just send us an email. There are several ways of migrating and the support for migration will not end as the Nextcloud devs keep the code compatible when new ownCloud versions are released. It’s still a good idea though to check the upgrade path in the Nextcloud documentation. In smaller environments with default settings you can use the Nextcloud migration tool with no preparation at all. The migration tool works for larger environments as well, but we recommend users to do preparations before the actual migration, especially if you have made custom changes to the server that ownCloud runs on. If you want Nextcloud experts to do it for you, both Nextcloud and Tech and Me offers support. Nextcloud offers enterprise support, and the basic tier starts at 1900€ / per year. The alternative to Nextcloud is the support provided by Tech and Me, and suits companies and people that don’t need a yearly subscription. Our support are based on 30 minute intervals, and in some cases we use fixed prices. We have several happy customers around the world and got good reviews in the past, one example is this.