How to Create Your Own Cloud Storage Service (ownCloud and Openshift)

The majority of the internet users rely on a cloud service to handle their storage and there are plenty of them out there; Google Drive, One Drive, Box, Dropbox and iCloud are just some of the major players in this field. One of the major drawbacks of these services is security, do you trust these companies and would allow them to save your sensitive data? If the answer is no then this tutorial is for you, this isn’t the only case in which you’d need your won cloud service; you might be a game developer and you’d like to host your games, business owners who wants to keep their sensitive information in a safe place, authors who want to keep their next creative project in a safe place and many other cases in which you might your own cloud service.

This is a step by step guide on how to create your own cloud service for free, if you can use your web browser then you can follow this tutorial, without further ado lets dive into the tutorial.

Ingredients

1. A free Openshift account, just go to Openshift website and register using your email, no credit card is required.

 

Steps

1. After registering; go to Openshift and click on the “My APPS” tab at the top of the screen.
2. You’ll be directed to anew window, click on the blue “Create your first application now” link.
3. You’ll be directed to anew window, in the search bar type “owncloud” and click search.
4. A giant white tab with “ownCloud” will appear to you, just click on it.
5. You’ll be directed to a new window, in the public URL; type the name of the project/application name (e.g. MyStorage, iCloud, etc.) in the first space and the domain name (it’s not your real domain name, just any identification name e.g. AwesomeGuy/AwesomeGal) in the second space.
6. Leave everything as it’s and click on “Create Application” tab at the end of the window.
7. You’ll be directed to a new window with your database credentials.
8. On that same window click on the blue “Continue to the application overview page” link.
9. You’ll be directed to a new window where you shall find all of your credentials again (MySQL password, database name and root user, etc.), copy them to a safe location on your local computer.
10. You shall find your admin login credentials on the same page as seen below.
11. You’ll be directed to the main window again, to visit your online cloud storage simply click on the blue link at the top of the screen (that’s your URL).
12. You’ll be directed to your online cloud storage, your username is “admin” and the password the one you’ve got from step 10.
13. Now, you’ve fully functional and free hosted cloud storage.
14. If you want your cloud service to have its own domain name then direct your new cloud to your own domain (e.g. www.example.com), simply put your Openshift address (xxxx-zzzz.rhcloud.com) in your CNAME field in your domain registrar panel, then open your panel and click on the blue “Change” link.
15. You’ll be directed to a new window; type your domain name in “Domain Name” field on Openshift.

Now you can enjoy your own secure cloud storage service, want to take it a step further, you can create your own small private business around this tutorial.