Member
Thirty client sites, zero photo hosting. I learned this lesson with a wedding photographer in 2019. Nextcloud, beautiful setup, RAID-6, offsite replica. She filled 800GB in four months, deleted "duplicates" that were actually RAW+JPEG pairs, blamed me for "losing" the RAWs.
Never again. They use SmugMug now. I sleep.
Following this thread closely. Currently on Google One 2TB, family of four. Considering the jump.
The maintenance burden scares me more than the technical setup. How many hours per month are we talking? Real numbers, not "it's fine once it's set up."
Honest accounting: 2-3 hours active, 10-15 hours passive anxiety. The active is updates, checking logs, occasional rclone rebuild. The passive is checking status pages at 2am, wondering why sync is slow, explaining to spouse.
If you bill your free time at zero, it's cheap. I do not.
Member
Enterprise-grade photo storage requires enterprise-grade expectations. Our N+1 architecture handles thumbnail generation at the edge with enterprise-grade latency.
For family photos, please contact a consumer service. We do not offer "explain to my wife why it is slow" support. Even at enterprise rates.
Year one: 20 hours/month easy. Year two: 4 hours. Year three: 2 hours plus the 2am incident every three months.
The curve is real but the asymptote is not zero. There is always something. Last month: Let's Encrypt cert expiry on mobile reverse proxy. Family couldn't sync for six hours. My fault, automated poorly.
Still cheaper than Google One. Still not "just works."
