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Back in the heyday of the dotcom bubble, there was a big push to move over to application service providers. The idea was simple: you don't need to keep all that pesky information locally, why not rent server space from an ASP? Let them run the servers, worry about keeping them up to date, and make them the responsible party for doing the backups. Just rent the service on a per-seat/per-month basis and add in more seats as you need them.

It seemed to be the ideal way to move forward, but in most instances it flopped. The biggest problem was that in the standard office environment all the staff are in one place and the server is in another, connected by a relatively unreliable Internet connection. Losing access to everything for a morning because a farmer has put a digger through your ADSL line isn't the sort of business continuity that companies want.

Nevertheless, there was, and still is, a considerable market for upstream Internet-hosted services. A classic example is the anti-virus and anti-spam work done by companies like Brightmail and MessageLabs - get your incoming and outgoing email flowing via one of these companies, and they can sort out any nasties on your email. Another class of Internet-hosted solution that has slowly grown in popularity is the facility to back up to a remote server farm. Given the rise in data-storage requirements, and the inability of tape drives to keep up both in terms of size and cost, it isn't surprising these solutions are gaining attention.

But over a few pints in the pub recently, it became clear in a chat with friends that there's a new attitude

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arising in users. I'll admit it's aimed at the personal sector at the moment, but there's no reason why it can't scale up. Simply put, users don't need to have any storage today. In the past, if you wanted to have a web-based email service, it was easiest to run your own web server and hook in something like Exchange Server's Outlook Web Access or something based around PHP or the like. If you wanted a complex photography site, you needed your own server space to do the job properly. The same applied to a discussion forum or some Internet-facing storage.

Today, the tables have turned, and in a quite dramatic fashion. Let's look at the various players and their offerings. Gmail from Google gives me effectively unlimited email storage. I currently have some 400MB in my inbox, and it says I can use 2,622MB of storage. There's an excellent web-based interface, and I can access it via POP3 too if I want to pull email into my mobile phone. Or I can take the POP3 route to make a local backup.

For disk storage, I have the .Mac service from Apple. Although this is seamlessly built into my Mac OS X Desktop, there's a driver for Windows that does the same thing - it mounts the remote storage onto your Desktop via WebDAV. Just drag and drop files into the remote store, and they trundle down the Internet pipe to the faraway servers. It's secure too, so I can put important things on there and access it via password control from any machine. This service costs me a few tens of pounds and gives me 2GB of storage space. If I want to build some websites, I can just design a site using the tools of my choice and drop it onto the storage area. It doesn't give me complex functionality, but it's adequate for basic web publishing.

For discussion groups, both public and private, I can have an account at LiveJournal and use a wide variety of tools to post information to it. For collections of photographs, take a look at Flickr (www.flickr.com) - I can place huge quantities of photographs there, and its paid-for service isn't expensive. Add in Skype for Internet telephony and my collection of data sources and facilities is almost complete.