One of my new years resolutions in my 2013 post was a move to the cloud. When talking about it with friends, I worked out that, I had meet my original goal of moving to the cloud pretty well. I thought it might be interesting to share my experiences of moving to the cloud and the services I had used to get there.

The original ideas of moving to the cloud was to keep my computing world a simple one. However I quickly discovered that no one provider, could meet all of my needs. The only one that really came close was Google, but I found many of there services lacking and I wasn’t completely happy with giving google all of my data. It was also a move from me to be a little bit more environmentally friendly. It has never really sat well with me, leaving a computer turned on  at all times. Admittedly all of these services I discuss will most likely have a massive server farms somewhere, however at least the power used to run the farm is not only being used to host my holiday snaps but most likely something a little more worthy as well. The added perk of  moving to the cloud is availability of data. If everything is on the internet, I can then just pick up and go with all of my data. Want to show a friend some my holiday snap, just login to my dropbox account in a browser and hey presto.

So before picking services and doing the research, I had to think about what I really cared about when it came to what I wanted access to. So I thought of the areas of the my life where I stored data and where I wanted access to the data. I broke it down into the following areas.

• Audio – Music, Audiobooks and Podcasts
• Video – Television and Movies
• Code – Code I use for my websites
• Documents and Photos – Documents, work and home snaps
• Email and News readers

Now I had the areas where I needed to stored data, I had to think about what my requirements for each service would be. So what were the basic requirements for every service I researched, which were.

• The service must be cheap or free
• The provider must have the backing of a massive company or have been around for at least 3 years. So that the service will not disappear over night
• Easy to setup or access. Not hours of installing.
• Where possible should have a mobile or web app to access data on the go.
• Must not lock the user down to a platform or device.

So after spending soo much time doing all of the research for these services I decided to write a series of posts (originally only one posts but it got far to big) where I discuss the pitfalls and problems with moving to the cloud and the services I am currently using. So over the coming weeks, will be a 6 posts where I discuss the areas above and the services I am using.

I would love to hear your feedback as I am writing these posts and your experiences of moving to the cloud. Please feel free to posts your thoughts in the comments below.