If you decided to backup your data to cloud using FTP then these test results may shed some light on what cloud storage service to use.
Though FTP (File Transfer Protocol) was born in 1971 it’s still widely used because of it’s simplicity and popularity and many businesses use this protocol to backup their sensitive data to remote cloud storages.
In this test I took five popular cloud storage services that support FTP and tried to upload and download 600 Mb file to and from those services from 5 places of the world including United States, Europe and Asia. To do so I created five Linux droplets at DigitalOcean and run the following commands on each of them (for uploading and downloading respectively):
[themify_box style=”gray rounded” ]
ncftpput -u <user> -p <password> <host> / <file>
ncftpget -u <user> -p <password> <host>/<file>[/themify_box]
If you want to skip the details you can go to the resume right away.
Livedrive
Livedrive is a general purpose European cloud storage service providing a number of application for different platforms. You can read our comprehensive review of it here. According to information provided by www.ipligence.com their FTP Server is located in Germany.
[table]Livedrive FTP,
Amsterdam,
London,
New York, San Francisco,
Singapore
Download (Mb/s),36,35,15,29,0.4
Upload (Mb/s),1.7,4.7,0.25,0.2,0.15[/table]
We see here that their download speed greatly exceeds the upload rate. Also we see quite poor results for Asia region.
ADrive
ADrive is another cloud storage service with FTP server in California (according to ipligence.com). They provide 50 Gb of free storage and support quite a number of access protocols.
[table]ADrive FTP, Amsterdam, London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore
Download (Mb/s),0.6,0.7,1,1.7,0.3
Upload (Mb/s),0.56,0.64,0.75,2.3,0.4[/table]
Unfortunately ADrive displayed the worst results among all other tested services.
Bakop
Bakop positions itself as a FTP-based offsite backup service. For this test I’ve chosen their server located in London.
[table]Bakop FTP, Amsterdam, London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore
Download (Mb/s),10.5,11,10,10,0.9
Upload (Mb/s),11,11,6.6,4,0.9[/table]
You can see that in average this service showed much better results than those general purpose cloud services we considered before. So probably if FTP is your main protocol then it’s a good idea to use a specialized service like Bakop.
BrickFTP
As it’s stated on their website BrickFTP provides “Secure File Sharing and Storage In The Cloud”. They support FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and even REST protocols. The server I tested was located in Ashburn, Virginia.
[table]BrickFTP, Amsterdam, London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore
Download (Mb/s),30,29,70,20,0.9
Upload (Mb/s),9,9,16,9.4,0.9[/table]
So, in general, BrickFTP displayed quite acceptable results and especially in NY 😉
HostedFTP
HostedFTP is another FTP-focused cloud storage. They call themselves as “FTP in the Cloud™”. For testing I chose their Ireland based server.
[table]HostedFTP, Amsterdam, London, New York, San Francisco, Singapore
Download (Mb/s),19.7,15,20,16.8,0.9
Upload (Mb/s),31,31,27,4.6,1[/table]
We see acceptable download and excellent upload speeds. Actually they displayed the best upload rate among all the services in this test.
Note also that Bakop, BrickFTP and HostedFTP provided the best speed for Asia region.
Resume
So what kind of deduction we can make here?
- If you’re in Asia you’d better find some local server since due to the limited channel’s bandwidth you probably won’t get more than 1 Mb/s
- If you’re serious with FTP then it will be a good idea to consider such FTP-focused services like Bakop, BrickFTP or HostedFTP instead of such general purpose ones like Livedrive or ADrive
- Despite its low upload speed Livedrive is a favorite in download speed race (not in Asia though)
- HostedFTP showed best upload speed for almost all regions (even for Asia)
- ADrive is the most slow FTP service among those five
What’s your experience?