Free or paid alternatives to OneDrive

Lugh said:

I agree. I've been using various MS storage facilities—email, files, company intranet, etc—for nearly 20 years without a problem. Please let us know if you find an objectively more trustworthy solution, many people would be interested in a second option.

You don't need a private server, a shared one will do just fine with a reputable host. I've been using Namecheap for $30/month for years for my company websites, and backup my critical local files there periodically. To access the files remotely, you ideally need FTP software, but you can do so via browser—but that's much slower for more than a few files. Look into their $15/year option if 20GB is enough space.

Namecheap has been my domain registrar for ~15 years, so I trust them nearly as much as MS.

Exactly. My main point about using your own private server though is that it's not in anyone else's hands. You can always rent rackspace / hard drive space on some service's servers, but why do you trust them more than Microsoft or any other service? In the end, if you truly want to know where your data is and who has seen it, the only way is to have your own setup that is entirely controlled by you. I suppose another option is to encrypt all of your data before sending it off to the cloud, but that requires some work and dramatically reduces your compatibility as well. Personally, in the long run, I'd rather have my own private server anyways because even costing a thousand or more up-front, I personally prefer a higher up-front cost than $30 a month or $100 a year. If it lasts me a while before needing an upgrade, then it was a better deal anyways.

However some people don't have the luxury of fast internet speeds at home or knowledge of how to setup a server etc. There's a lot of factors to look at.