In today’s post, I’m going to show you how to set up your own cloud storage web app, similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, but with substantially lower costs. This solution provides cloud storage at ~$0.60 per TB/month. By comparison, the same storage would cost $8.25 per month on Dropbox or $10 per month on Google Drive.

Video tutorial

I created a screencast that walks through the steps of this guide and demonstrates the final result. It achieves an identical result to this blog post, but performs more configuration in GUIs, whereas this blog post uses the command line whenever possible.

A year in blogging

I started this blog in May of last year. I don’t mean to brag, but by last April, after less than a year of blogging, I was pulling in upwards of 20 visitors per day, several of whom were not spam bots. That number reached as high as 50 visitors on days when I made a new post and begged for readers through every social media channel at my disposal.

When I started writing React – I made a big mess. Many of my components took too many props, or my component had an immense amount of state. Doing simple things required a lot of data manipulation, and ultimately led to a lot of bugs. It didn’t take long for simple tasks to become extremely tedious. I think this happens to a lot of people who start out with React. It’s almost too easy to write a lot of code, when in reality, the answer may be that less is more.

Introduction

This is the story of GreenPiThumb: a gardening bot that automatically waters houseplants, but also sometimes kills them.

The story begins about a year ago, when I was struck by a sudden desire to own a houseplant. A plant would look nice, supply me with much needed oxygen, and imply to guests that I’m a responsible grown-up, capable of caring for a living thing.

A seedy reddit post

The night was June 9th, 2017. It was a typical Friday night for me. I was watching Netflix and checking reddit partying with cool kids.

Suddenly, I saw this post on the “New” tab of the /r/siacoin subreddit:

If you’re not familiar with Siacoin, it’s a cryptocurrency that allows you to rent out your spare hard disk space or buy space from others. I’ve written about this technology a couple times previously (mining guide, NAS guide).