personal cloud

A  personal cloud  is a software solution to administrate various cloud services, usually with a nice user interface, on servers you personally control.

Why
The goal of personal clouds is to make it easy for an end-user to manage a server and deploy services such as email, web hosting and XMPP.

Many people who are not used to administrating servers may find it easier to setup a personal cloud on a VPS or dedicated server, and from there deploy their favorite content management system.

Personal Clouds are notably known for making it easy to administrate email servers.

IndieWeb Examples
There are a number of IndieWeb community members who are putting specific effort into moving away from cloud silos and rebuilding their applications on top of cloud (or even just web hosting) building blocks, from providers they can swap in and out and switching between at their desire.
 * http://petar.petrovic.io/2013/10/17/how-i-built-my-own-personal-cloud/
 * People who want to host their own version(s) of things that might make their data available on several machines might find this article helpful. I know I did —
 * Lessons in Self-Hosting Your Own Personal Cloud

Solutions
There are many projects under development that are attempting to make installing of server side software on personal clouds as easy as installing apps on a mobile device.


 * Indie Box
 * UBOS
 * Sandstorm
 * ArkOS (dead 2017-04)
 * Cloud Fleet
 * Cozy (may be worth a separate article to document the below)
 * Note: not a content hosting / blog hosting service / software (yet?)
 * Lack of "eating what you cook":
 * Cozy uses a Twitter (linked from their home page) and does not self-host any of their tweets
 * Cozy uses a Medium (linked from their home page) which has blog posts that are not on their actual blog (also linked from their home page)
 * Tiki Suite
 * PageKite
 * YunoHost
 * Webmin and Virtualmin GPL (this was a big thing a long while ago)
 * Zentyal (originally known as eBox) is mostly for small business use, but it could some handy for many home-server situations, including email
 * iRedMail offers and out-of-the-box, easy to administer email solution
 * More projects exists, please add them...