We are currently seeing an unprecedented attack on open science. Universities are put under pressure to terminate ‚unwanted‘ research lines, and governments push for more and more influence on curricula and research topics.

This can make it difficult for researchers to use their universities‘ digital infrastructure for their work:

• Will the administration read their groups emails to comply with government mandates and find ‚forbidden‘ research?
• Is research data still safe and sufficiently confidential?
• Can a group be sure that their research data is not uploaded to major cloud providers, and thereby exposed to government observation?

A European Hosted Alternative

With cloudheads.net, we are offering a ‚research group in a box‘ solution that allows researchers to maintain their digital and academic independence. We, and your infrastructure then reside in Germany, a country with constitutionally guaranteed academic freedom.

We operate your tailor made infrastructure with all the key-services needed to keep a research group going, and make sure that you remain in control:

• You get a dedicated domain registered to you; This lets you move the services we provide to another operator
• We offer all essential services for a group, and let you setup users for whomever you want:
  • E-Mail addresses and aliases for every group member, including a web mail setup
  • Mailing lists for projects and events
  • Shared file-storage and calendars with ‚Nextcloud‘ (like Google drive, but self hosted ;-))
  • Claper, a Mentimeter like audience engagement tool
  • A wiki to organize and document activities
  • A website for your group
  • Mattermost, a self-hosted Slack alternative, for your group
  • A BigBlueButton instance for lectures & meetings
• You get access to daily (encrypted) full backups of your infrastructure; You remain in control!

Our base offer does not include personal support for, e.g., configuring your email client.

Pricing & Payment

Our base offer goes for €299/month for the operation of your Infrastructure incl. up to 2TB of storage, without any sign-up fee!

We invoice quarterly, and payments to our European bank account can be arranged via, e.g., wise.com.