An idea that’s been in the back of my head for a while has been to get rid of the home server and have everything hosted somewhere else…

(somewhere with a nice big internet connection)

I’m about 3/4 of the way through planning this, and am at the stage where I want to test out some providers.

We won’t mention names yet, but if it all pans out, there will be a big post about the solution.

The idea is to outsource a server that holds all the new stuff (fresh episodes of TV shows, movies that I want to watch but have not committed to yet, etc), as well as a good chunk of the archive of HD content.
The CPU will be powerful enough to enable this server to become my personal Netflix, with the added bonus of being able to share personal media with friends…

Of course, everything will be available via the RasPi, iOS devices, Android devices, and laptops. This change will also means that having a super huge connection at home becomes less of a priority, which might even make the whole thing cheap while it makes it more stable and more convenient.

There are thousands of seedbox companies now, and since the technology lines up extremely well (raw HD space on a very fast internet connection) it makes the cost of something like this almost trivial once I can find a company that lets me have terabytes of space in trade for the small amount of constant processing this server will need.

Having a media server in the cloud just feels like the right choice.