Hey, so I recently had the idea of proposing some new ideas, I had for the IT infrastructure of my local scouts organisation, mainly it’s own nextcloud instance and website (and if that works well, maybey a matrix server and wiki, but website and nextcloud are much higher priority right now). But, I am wondering, what the best way to do the hosting would be. Using a VPS would be pretty nice, because there would be no upfront cost, but we would have to pay monthly fee and that’s pretty hard to pitch for a new and untested idea, especially because we don’t have that much regular funds/income. The other option would be to self host on hardware that stays in the building, but I am not quite shure, but then we would have a pretty steep upfront cost and I am not 100 percent shure, if we even have a proper network in the building.
The main thing, I am trying to ask here is, if any of you have ever done something similar before and if so, how you did it. Also I am thankful for any advice in general. I have done this already for my family, but doing this for an entire organistation is an entirely different thing. Thank you very much in advance!
I simply wouldn’t. Just use Google Drive or Dropbox.
Unless you can provide redundancy and 24x7 support you don’t want others dependent on you.
I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/month, maybe even less, depending on how much heavy usage your Nextcloud instance requires. And you won‘t have to worry about keeping your hardware and network running, which pretty much always takes up more time than expected.
Some web hosters (I‘ve had very good experiences with Hetzner) charge an hourly rate and allow you to preconfigure VPSes with software like Nextcloud. So unless you have specific needs, you could just spin up an instance, check if it suits your needs and, if not, only pay a few cents.
My nextcloud is on a relatively expensive ($5/month) VPS but I should get off my butt and move it to a $2/month one. I like to hope your organization can afford that, at least for a while. I will PM you a link where as a broke nonprofit you might be able to get a free one if you ask nicely.
I think it’s not worth trying to self-host on your own hardware unless you want to experience the hassles and headaches as a self-education or hobby goal in its own right.
How much storage you want? Do you want any specific feature beyond file sharing?
How much experience do you have self hosting stuff? What is the purpose of this project? (E.g. maybe you want a learning experience, not using commercial services, just need file sharing?)
Linode. I don’t trust the parent company but who can you trust? It’s super easy to setup and like $5 a month for a small scale project that isn’t mission critical.
Note: I would never use it for a paid or really important thing. If you expect your Boy Scout group to have 50,000 users one day, it’s not fit for purpose. It’s more than fine for a little league schedule or whatever.
Linode has good, cheap VMs, and are a better deal than the AWSs of the world.
Also, when you set up Nextcloud, also set up something like
samba-domainwith LDAP for users. That way you have central user management as you add new services.There are dozens of reputable website hosting companies, and Microsoft offer 365 for free to non-profits up to 300 users iirc.
This takes care of basically everything you need, without any risk to you or the scouts. You definitely do not want to be hosting a website and file server for a public company on an old laptop in a cupboard.
Look into digital ocean. They have pretty cheap hosting, like $6 a month last time I checked. You used to be able to get a month for free too. If it looks like a good option I can probably rustle you up a referral code.
I think that is for a shared CPU not a dedicated CPU. Nextcloud can be resource intensive in some cases so you probably do not want to run it on a shared plan.
I understand what you’re saying, but I think the user counts and usages would matter big time. I used to run it on the smallest plan DO offered, but I haven’t in a few years now. No idea if the usage requirements have grown over time, and that was just for 2 users. I know a lot of people run it on a NAS in a VM or container, that’s not exactly a dedicated machine either.
i’d say start small. do the the webpage on some old hardware, maybe a wiki. content consumption things that would be uncomplicated for the group to adopt. avoid things that would mean managing accounts for other people early on. a wiki or some static page using something like modocs will be easy to run off a decent internet connection at the building. low bandwith usage and low traffic.
if your goal is to degoogle group, nextcloud could be helpful for the organisers. maybe if you have success on the simple sites you can get people on board with some hardware for a small nextcloud server. but dont plan on opening the next cloud up to the kids. thats a world of risk you don’t need to open up.
I’m not sure if they provide the service for non French organizations, but FramaSpace offers free nextcloud instances for some non profits.
My local ecology-focused organization has an instance thanks to them ♥️
We (uk scout group) use g suite or whatever they call it these days. The Google connection isn’t ideal, but we get it completely free, the t&cs and level of control over it are a lot better than consumer gmail/drive, the learning curve for techphobic users is about as shallow as possible, and we don’t have to spend volunteer time on maintaining the platform. So definitely worth it for us but your situation may vary.
I have a G Suite account. It’s like $10/mo for my use case. Not a fan of google, either, but being on the business side of it helps me learn more.
Yeah, it can definetely be a great solution, but the idea for this was specifically to be more independent from big tech. We already habdle stuff like registering for camps over Office 365, but I wanted to introduce Nextcloud to replace that, because I don’t think it’s a good idea to let Microsoft handle personal data of like a hundred people, that probably don’t even know, that they are giving away their data to Microsoft there. But again, I don’t wanna judge anyone for using things like that, Nextcloud can be a pain to maintain, especially for non technical people.
Microsoft are one of the only companies you should be trusting with your data at business levels. If they weren’t secure you’d have heard about it.
User data is typically private on business plans, at least if you stick to the core services. Plenty of companies use O365, GSuite, or whatever to facilitate this kind of thing and I’m sure they would be pitching a huge fit if their user data was being collected.
If you VPS it, remember to add a snapshot backup. Such as $5 vultr VPS always add the $2 snapshot backup option.
I was curious, whats the purpose of it? The vps host should have some redundancy in case of hardware failure. Is it for user error if I accidentally delete my server?
It’s to save your data. The VPS provider has redundancies in place for the hardware, but unless you’re paying specifically for data backups, they aren’t going to bend over for that.
As someone who has no real experience with Nextcloud: Do I ‘need’ it, when I already have a NAS with Synology Drive running on it, being accessible through Tailscale?
If there’s nothing utterly specific from the nextcloud ecosystem that you absolutely need, no, Synology has you covered
Hetzner Storage Share
run the nextcloud-all-in-one on an old laptop
