Seeking alternative to box.net

February 26, 2008 2:40 PM

I'm looking for some type of alternative to box.net. I do web development and I'd like to move all my project assets off my local machine. I've got about 100 projects totaling about 50GB. Read more about managing access...

Box.net seems to be the ideal solution, but for 50 GB of storage it's going to cost me almost $50 per month. I was wondering if I could make something work with either a standard website hosting account (most have tons of space) or something like Amazon's S3 service.

Here are my requirements:
1. Offsite (non-public/protected) storage of about 50MB - mainly we'll be storing, photoshop files, images, documents, etc.
2. The ability to share certain directories with other users (10 max) as needed (meaning I would turn access on and off)
3. An easy way to connect (i.e. FTP, SFTP) - I don't think a web front end would work as it is a pain to download and then upload - I'd prefer to 'mount a remote drive'

Here is what I'm not sure about: versioning and simultaneous access. Is there a way to avoid more than one person accessing the files at once.

Note I've also looked into Basecamp and Backpack. Not exactly what I need.

Any ideas? Thanks.

posted by namith to technology (8 comments total)

JungleDisk.com
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 2:41 PM on February 26

Saw JungleDisk, but I'm not sure how that help me manage user access.
posted by namith at 2:46 PM on February 26

$50 a month is pretty reasonable for the kind of managed space with features you are looking for, and I don't think you will find a better solution than Box.net. Are you self-employed? Do you make money off these projects? Because a $300/year write-off isn't necessarily a bad thing.
posted by fusinski at 2:52 PM on February 26

S3 will do virtually all of this for you at the lowest price possible.

You can set user premissions pretty finely, as well as setting expiring permissions if needed: e.g. let a user view a file for only an hour etc.

You can change user permssions very easily using something like S3Fox or S3 Backup, as well as using those to upload files or sync directories. (I use a mixture of S3 Backup for files which need some level of permission based flexibility or S3 Webmaster for easy uploading of files for public use) (There are pay alternatives such as Bucket Explorer but as far as I am concerned S3 Backup and Webmaster do all I need)

Simultaneous access is the one thing I don't think you will have have the ability to control, although I could be wrong.

I love S3 and EC2.
posted by Hartster at 2:52 PM on February 26

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't you just want hosting that gives you access to the shell? I use both dreamhost.com and pairlite.com. Dreamhost has stupid amounts of space; i think pairlite is pretty decent as well. You can use .htaccess to give individual (web-based) access to files/directories, etc. Or set up multiple ftp accounts. Perhaps you'd be even able to install your own copy of cvs or subversion if it isn't already supported, if you want versioning. (I've read about people, on one of my two hosts, can't remember which, rolling their own php versions, so cvs should be a relative snap compared to that...). I paid $100/year for pairlite, and $10 for the first year with Dreamhost.

Any webhost you can ssh to, you can mount as a drive. The software may not be technically free for Windows, but it's most certainly free on linux.
posted by cgg at 3:00 PM on February 26

Um yeah, as cgg said, why not just get standard shared hosting and set up ftp accounts with .htaccess files for directory-level permissions?
posted by junesix at 6:23 PM on February 26

I use dreamhost and it is pretty ridiculously cheap for the space and bandwidth I get. I've got lots of FTP accounts for various users and a few different SVN repositories. Works great.
posted by bigtex at 7:51 PM on February 26

Can a S3 user answer if the service (and by extension JungleDisk?) still has problems with files between 2gb and 4gb? That such a bug could linger greatly turned me off from S3.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 4:51 AM on February 27