Celebrating 2 years Nextcloud

Just over two years ago on June 2, a dozen engineers started a new journey: Building a better private cloud. One that delivered on the needs of users and customers, providing ultimate protection for their data while empowering them to share, collaborate and be productive in a fun and efficient way.

Today, 732 days later, we have shown our ability to execute on that vision! Nextcloud is widely recognized as one of the most innovative, forward-looking projects in the open source world, pushing boundaries in the areas of security, collaboration and communication.

Fast growth

Our company has more than tripled to about 40 people and almost 150 customers trust us to provide them first-class services. Some are public organizations like the German Federal Government or Wikipedia. Others are universities and research institutes like the TU Berlin or the Max Planck Institute, financial services or manufacturing like Raiffeisen or SIEMENS, airlines like Germania and dozens more – Nextcloud keeps data under control everywhere.

Innovation

We’ve pioneered new collaboration technologies with Nextcloud Talk and Collabora Online and we’ve designed an unique-in-the-industry End-to-end Encryption technology, maturing fast. We also pushed the technological limits of a private cloud: With Global Scale, Nextcloud can scale to tens of millions of users. We’re not just claiming that: We have live customers using this technology at multi-million user scale. No other self-hosted file sync and share company has anything like it!

Quality and satisfaction

We didn’t just introduce new features. Our Android and iOS clients are rated better than nearly all our competition, our desktop client is under heavy development (stay tuned: the next release will be awesome) and we solved many long standing quality issues in the Nextcloud server.

Upgrading is one area where our improvement stand out: this was a promise when we started, and we kept it. Within a week of the Nextcloud 13, over 10.000 servers had already successfully upgraded, showing the progress we made.

Security is another highlight. Our security bug bounty program is showing an average response time of under one hour over the last three months. In two years, we paid nearly USD 8K to security experts, resolving almost 100 reports and dealing with hundreds more. And of course our End-to-end Encryption technology, available in our mobile clients and coming soon to the desktop client, has changed the state-of-art of encryption technology for private clouds.

Community

Of course, we can’t forget to mention how our community has grown since we got started. You might remember our press release early January, throwing nice growth numbers around. We’ve kept growing since then, hitting well over 10K newsletter subscribers. Our forums our forums grew by 40% since January and now hit well over 1.1 million page views per month. Almost 2000 users were active in the last week, 124 of whom are new to Nextcloud. And yes, we continue to be the most searched-for self-hosted cloud technology, just check google trends. That bright blue line jumping over the other players – that is us!

The future

We are proud of what we accomplished. No doubt. But we wouldn’t be who we are if we weren’t looking ahead – at far bigger challenges than those we’ve mounted already. The world is changing quick and the introduction of the GDPR has impressed on many how privacy is not something to be ignored. We offer a uniquely suitable solution for enterprises in following the law, just as we empower home users to take back control over their data. The vast majority of data is still held by a small number of very large companies, and there is a lot of decentralization left to do.

We want to put even more users in control over their data – join us and contribute! You can meet us at the Nextcloud Conference, coming at the end of August in Berlin!