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.
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.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.
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.
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?
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
Hey, what’s your budget? You could go far with a second-hand NUC (next unit of computing), I’m sure you can get one for under $100 and you could do more than just nextcloud with it (peertube, VPN, chat etc).
I personally think this is a better idea than an old laptop. Easier to work on if the fan or SSD ever dies, and the cooling is a little better than any cheaper laptops I have worked on. It also wouldn’t need to be a NUC, basically every PC company makes a SFF or 1L sized computer, I’m partial to the Lenovo but the Dell’s are pretty nice too. I have about 8 Lenovo that are used as mini servers between home and work, on 24/7
I hosted my First Nextcloud instance, on old Hardware, a few years ago for my sister, who wanted to Exchange Pictures with her scouts. Since then i converted the instance for my personal use and hosted multiple nextcloud instances for Business customers.
My recommendation ist to look wath you need in terms of availabillity and redundance. For my personal use it’s fine if the Nextcloud is down for a few days, but for a Business that can be fatal. If your requirements are Low you can opt for old Hardware on premiss, but you have to think about electricity and Internet Connection. If one of those is down your nextcloud is not accessable.
If you need a reliable solutuion i would recommend opting for a Cloud solution, so you don’t have to worry about Hardware, Internet and electrisity. Ether with Something like hetzner Share (i have no experience with Managed Nextcloud instances, but i know a company who is fine with it) or a VPS. If you are opting for a VPS, you should Look at storage Options, as Block storage is easy to Set Up but can be expensive if you need large ammounts of storage. Objectstorage can be a cheaper alternative, but it’s more complex to Set Up. Hybrid solutions are possible, for example with the external storage App in Nextcloud.
If you want to Host in premisess with old Hardware i would recommend looking at Energy prices as, old Enterprise Hardware can be quite powerhungry. Also you should Setup Hardware Monitoring so you get alertet if, for example a hard drive is about to fail or already failed.
And very importend think of your Backups. You need a storage to save your Backups and a Connection with enought bandwith. Trust me, you dont want to Upload 1 TB over a 16 Mbit/s Connection. Many Cloud Providers are offering Backup solutions, but be aware, you should have Backups in different Location as Datacenters can burn down to, as we saw a few years ago in france.
The perfect solution doesn’t exist. You have to Look at what you need and what you can afford. IT-Intrastructure always costs something. If it’s Not Money, it’s time, energy, electrisity or Something else.
I hope this was helpfull.
The by far easiest to try would be to order one of these: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
Only downside with hetzner storage share (compared to other managed hosting providers) is, that you need to run your own collabora instance on a VPS to use nextcloud office And ffmpeg isn’t available on most managed hostings
Haven’t tried it out, but there are some free Nextcloud hosts listed on the official website.
