Hearing that we have discontinued our fully-hosted FolderGrid service and now only offer our self-hosted FolderGrid Appliance, several customers have written us queries asking about the viability of our services. We understand that concern and want to post some thoughts here to help allay it.
From the beginning, we wanted FolderGrid to offer a cost-effective solution for small & medium sized businesses (SMBs) that need to provide many users access to a HIPAA compliant file storage & sharing service. We shutdown the hosted cloud service because it wasn’t cost effective for us to provide support for the myriad of end-user requests we fielded concerning our cloud-based filesystems. Based upon our experience, we now feel that the only viable business model for a fully-hosted solution is to charge per-user and there are several services out there with that model already. Our self-hosted appliance allows us to serve SMB customers who appreciate our flat pricing but have the technical chops necessary to run & maintain a HIPAA compliant appliance.
In short - we pivoted from a model that saw us selling business to business (B2B) but practically supporting business to consumer (B2C) over to a model where we are true B2B now. The full transition will take awhile - but we’re certainly committed to it. Our FolderGrid Appliance offers the same fully encrypted cloud-based filesystem atop cloud storage with a fully open API previously provided by our hosted service - but the appliance has the additional benefit of an open sourced back-end allowing customers even more extensibility.
We offer our appliance as an Amazon Marketplace AMI and as a Dockerized container. If you have any questions about how to get started - please feel free to contact us here.