Dropbox and GitHub servers are optimised ”out of the box“ to be fast and reliable (pages are compressed and deflated). Switching to the cloud, made my websites online with an uptime of 99.991%. Previously, with my VPS, and going back even more, with my shared hosting, the uptime was good but I would experience downtime. In case you screwed up something, you can restore the file (as well as previous versions of it) and revert the changes. The extra layer of pushing the files to GitHub as well, offered double protection. The free 2GB of space offered by Dropbox was more than enough.īackup.

Uploading to GitHub (known as pushing), is very simple: commit, add your message and push the changes. The file is accessible anytime from anywhere (Dropbox website, desktop, laptop, mobile, tablet). Just drag-n-drop the file inside your Dropbox folder. Free 2GB space for Dropbox and unlimited public repos for GitHub.Įasy to use. It’s free and your account is created immediately.

I switched to these two services for a couple of reasons:įree.

That’s when I made the decision to use the cloud. Having been left only with my domain names, I had to do something (for alone, I was averaging around 700 unique visitors per day). Pissed off, I cancelled my account, got my refund and didn’t think back (or forward). My last backup of the websites was in December 2011. The dude that was assigned to me was not helpful at all and said there was nothing to be done. So that day came, and I went straight to their support ticketing system. Because I considered paying $20 per month for simply hosting my files was enough, I didn’t enable the backup option (it was an extra $2 per month, if I remember correctly). The drop that spilled the cup came one day of February 2012, when all my websites (folders) were deleted somehow. After I was done, the server was running CentOS + nginx + PHP-fpm + MySQL, hosting my websites and Wordpress blogs. I busted my chops trying to configure a fast server. This company gives you a server as is and you have to install the OS by yourself, maintain it, improve its performance, etc. Prior to the cloud, I was hosting my websites on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with a company called Linode.

I was pissed at the hosting companies charging so much, having such crappy support, and much downtime. I did the switch out of impulse: I was pissed. I tried it as an experiment never for a second I thought it would work this well. A few months ago I cancelled my hosting and server accounts and moved all my websites to the cloud.

Dropbox app vs website