What do you think is the best (and cheapest) way to host a new nextcloud instance and website for my local scouts organisation?
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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
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Given someone already pays for electricity and internet at the location, I’d say the cheapest option would be to ask all the members if someone has an old laptop to donate, maybe even with a broken display or whatever, main thing is it still somehow runs. Rip out the battery, Install Linux, Nextcloud (maybe Yunohost), and put it somewhere without public access. That’d be entirely for free, minus the work to set it up and maintain it.
My smaller VPS costs somewhere around 70€ a year, guess that could be worth it as well as long as it contributes something meaningful.
And be prepared to be disappointed, 99% of my scout group never used the selfhosted services I tried. I guess that’s somehow okay. They were focused on the real life activities and no one had any interest to do office work or remember logins… Was always the same 2 people who did paperwork and they didn’t need a cloud, so I scrapped it. Your story could be different, I’m not saying it needs to turn out that way.
Don’t rip out the battery, that’s free UPS!
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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’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
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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?
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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!
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.
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Don’t rip out the battery, that’s free UPS!
Yes, but there’s 2 sides to that story. It’s a free UPS and that’s really nice. But then I’ve seen old batteries degrade and swell. People call it the spicy pillow syndrome. And with two of my older devices, batteries got recalled by the manufacturer. So I’d advise against running these things 24/7 unattended. Either know what you’re doing or rip it out before it burns down the building. As a minimum that includes a location made of concrete or bricks and mortar and no burnable stuff in the vicinity. And regular checks on the state of the battery, maybe both visual inspections and whatever the mainboard reports.
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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. -
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!
Hardware does not need a steep upfront costs.
You don’t need a nasa pc to run nextcloud, larger businesses routinely trow away machines that are beyond what you need. Chances are family of a member already has some machines they where going to trow away. Your hardware priorities are most cpu cores with as much compatible ram.
The advantages of having your own hardware is you can run multiple local servers and let members experience without additional costs. Imagine it like a private mini internet run by members that only is accessible at location.
I highly recommend proxmox as a server os which has 1 line helper script commands that create a whole nextcloud installation and others automatically, its also very easy to backup those.
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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 -
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 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.
