In article , The Natural Philosopher
wrote:
Adding free software to a rented (virtual) server to make a global
cloud is not actually any cheaper than renting a bit of someone
elses cloud.

To be fair to the OP (Tim Watts) the issue seems not to be one of cost,
but rather of privacy and control.

Google make all this lovely free stuff available (at some cost to them,
in terms of development and hosting) so that we will be encouraged to
use their services and partake of their delicious advertising. shrug
it's a business model, and rather less obnoxious than some. One thing
that Google (and others like them) are NOT likely to do is to share
their IP so that we can all run lookalike ad-free servers for our own
convenience.

Pity, I'd love to be able to use software as nice as Google Docs from a
private cloud so that my data wasn't on Google's servers (or, indeed,
and servers outside my own country of residence).

If its domestic file sharing you want, stuff a domestic files
server in.

That does, indeed, work fairly well ... though that it takes a little
more effort to make it safely available remotely (VPN).

The problem here is the Chromebook, which won't talk CIFS. It's easy
enough to put files on a local server (Apache, whatever) and access
them from the browser on a Chromebook, but some server-side cloudiness
is needed to make it possible to upload them back to the server
afterwards, and it won't be as transparent as using Google Docs on
Google Drive.

I would have thought something like OwnCloud would provide that,
though? (OK, I note the OP's issue with the number of shares OwnCloud
Free allows.)
--
Cheers,
Daniel.