Download websites that use ownCloud

About ownCloud

Self hosted software leaves a different kind of trace from a hosted service. ownCloud is a file sync and sharing platform that an organisation installs on infrastructure it controls, so a domain where we detect it is not the customer of a cloud product but the operator of one. Every hit represents a decision that storage and sharing should sit on the organisation's own hardware or its own rented server rather than inside somebody else's account.

ownCloud GmbH publishes the platform under the AGPL licence, written in PHP, with our earliest detection dated to 2010. A copyleft licence combined with a self hosted deployment model explains the kind of organisation that shows up in the data: institutions with a policy reason to keep files inside a boundary they can point at, including universities, public bodies, healthcare providers, professional practices and companies working under contractual data residency terms. The technology choice is downstream of a compliance decision, which is why a domain here reads more like a procurement signal than a preference.

Detection depends on a login page being reachable from the public internet. Many deployments sit behind a corporate firewall or a virtual private network, and others answer only on internal host names that no domain based crawl will ever see. As of October 2026 we detect ownCloud on 121 sites, and the real installed base is considerably larger, because the whole point of the product encourages precisely the deployments a public scan cannot reach.

The visible subset is still the right input for several jobs. Vendors selling storage, backup, endpoint security or migration services get a list of organisations that run their own file infrastructure and therefore carry the operational burden themselves. Security researchers get a population to measure exposure across, since a publicly reachable file sync login is an authentication surface worth studying in aggregate rather than one instance at a time. Competitors in the same category get accounts whose objection to hosted software is already known and does not need discovering.

A per-domain check confirms a single installation. The dataset supplies the population: every domain where the login is visible, filterable by top level domain, by country and by what else runs on the host, and comparable between exports so that migrations become visible. Migration is the movement that matters in this category, because organisations that self host rarely change their minds quietly, and a domain leaving the set between two exports is a procurement event somebody can act on.