Yes I was looking for EU only cloud services and most are USA based. So the same problem remains. It could be an immense boost to an EU only cloud provider.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD[/quote]So why aren't we doing this?

Seriously - we have the skills, talent and drive here to put something like this together. If it's such a problem, then surely there's the need to plug the gap?

Money. The major cost of a cloud service, at least one you expect people to pay for, is the availability of resilient storage and bandwidth. Given the remit of the service is to be entirely within the EU, we couldn't use any US hosted storage service like Amazon S3, we'd have to either set up a hosting business or pay a third party hoster a ton of money.

Last system I set up that could be comparable to a small commercial cloud service (i.e tens of thousands of users with in the order of 100GB of storage quota each) cost in the order of a million pounds. That's pretty much just the cost of the hardware, not ongoing service and bandwidth costs.

Now I'm not saying you couldn't raise that as venture capital because, as you say, there's an obvious business case for it. But a cloud host isn't a 'soft' service you can set up on a dime. It needs a large lump of money spent on infrastructure and setup before it starts making money.

Money might be a problem but do people actually need 100Gb of cloud storage? I could easily cope with a lot less as a EU compliant alternative to Dropbox. I think my Dropbox account is only 2.5Gb I only need that for syncing. If people want a 100Gb service they could pay extra for that, pretty muchj like they do with Dropbox.