Offcloud review video
What is offcloud?
Offcloud is not a standard multihoster. Its meant to transfer files from one-click-hoster, the usenet or torrents to your cloud space. You can enter your cloud credentials for some popular cloud services like Dropbox. If you have a premium account you get 100GB storage from offcloud so there is no need for an other cloud storage. Transferring files to an FTP server is also possible.
If you just want to download files from One-Click-Hosters you can just add your offcloud account to JDownloader. Direct downloads from the usenet are not possible.
How does it work?
The desired file have to be pasted into the Offcloud webinterface. The download immediately starts to the desired target. After the files have been downloaded to the cloud they can be transferred to your computer.
Push to FTP
A really cool feature is push to FTP, in theory you could connect a NAS to offcloud and directly transfer all files to you NAS. To test this, I setup and FTP server on my NAS and forwarded the port in my router. Not to mention that I made sure that FTP transfer is encrypted. I tried to connect my offcloud account but it failed:
- encryption seems not be supported
- I can not configure paths to my ftp server
- this is needed for a qnap NAS
At the end I could not test or use this feature as intended.
Push to Cloud
I also tried to push files to cloud storage and the transfer to the offcloud storage (100GB) always worked fine and the download from the offcloud server to my computer were always at full speed. A transfer of a torrent file into Mega.nz failed. The torrent file was not downloaded for hours. However the transfer of a nzb usenet file worked fine to Mega.nz.
As already mentioned you can also use Dropbox but just 2GB are free so large files can not be transferred to Dropbox.
To be fair: the Mega.nz implementation is considered as unstable by offcloud but it is also the service which provides you 50GB for free.
Speed
I performed some speedtests and offcloud just worked fine! Transfers to offcloud were always fast and Downloads to my computer were also at full speed.
Limits
Some daily limits are in place:
- Uploaded 10GB / day
- Usenet 20GB / day
- Rapidgator 20GB / day
- Cloud Storage 100GB
- and some more limits…
I couldn’t find any information about torrent limits.
In my opinion these limits are too strict for a multihoster.
Update 24.01.2017:
There are no limits for torrents in place (I got an answer from the support).
Easy or complicated?
In my opinion the usenet download is too complicated with offcloud. If you have a standard usenet provider you get the login credentials for a usenet server and can use a programm like sabnzbd. This program will download and unzip the files completely automatic for you. If you use the offcloud solution it is more complicated: the files will be transfered to your cloud storage and you have to do the unzipping manually. If you do not use a cloud which transfers the files automatically you have to do this step manually too. In my opinion far to complicated…
Features
- JDownloader compatibility
- two different Chrome extensions are offered
- support could not explain this to me
- interface hard to understand
- informations are missing (torrent limit?)
- advantage of cloud download not clear for me
Support
- Good ticket system
- fast anwsers
- told me that a folder path for ftp is planned
Everything fine with the support so far.
Privacy
IP Address : Each time you visit the Site, we automatically collect your IP address and the web page from which you came. In order to administer and optimize the Site for you and to diagnose problems with our Site, we use your IP address to help identify you and to gather broad demographic information about you. We also use your IP address to restrict the access of your account to broader users.
This violation of your privacy is not acceptable for a multihoster in my opinion.
Prices
With $9.99 it is not a cheap service compared to its competitors. The price would be fair if the limits are not as strict as they are at the moment.