Why Ocelot-Cloud?

Citizens and small businesses rely on cloud, messaging, and video calling every day, but no single service meets all their needs:

  • convenience
  • privacy
  • customization
  • long-term security

Let’s look at some typical approaches, why they fall short, and what the ideal solution looks like.

Option 1: Public Cloud Services

Outsourcing to a public cloud is hassle-free, no hardware, pay-as-you-go, but it comes with serious trade-offs:

  • Unpredictable terms and conditions: sudden price increases, feature removals, even bankruptcy.
  • Vendor lock-in: Migration can be slow, costly, or technically painful.
  • Opaque infrastructure: data resides in unknown locations and may be subject to unauthorized inspection.
  • Limited freedom: Proprietary software are closed off limiting customization and integration.

Takeaway: To maintain control of our data, we need self-hosted infrastructure.

Option 2: DIY Self-Hosting

Running your own digital infrastructure gives you full control, but requires deep system administration expertise, constant patching, updating, backups, etc., which is typically out of reach for most individuals and SMBs.

Takeaway: Automation must replace manual maintenance.

Option 3: Proprietary Self-Hosting Suites

There are proprietary solutions, i.e. their source code is not open, which brings back the same problems as with cloud providers: vendor lock-in, unilateral license changes, etc.

Takeaway: Freedom requires open-source.

Enter Ocelot-Cloud

Ocelot-Cloud offers an open source Community Edition which automates maintenance tasks like updates and backups and can be self-hosted on your own hardware. While the Community Edition has all the basic features, we also offer a commercial Premium Edition with advanced features to fund our development efforts. There is no vendor lock-in because we have made it easy for you to change editions or migrate servers whenever you want. We also provide an App Store like on smartphones in which everyone can upload their own software packages, which we call “apps” as we intend to allow a diverse ecosystem of software to be used with Ocelot-Cloud giving you the flexibility you may need.