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!
Just a general warning:
It is one thing to provide something for family. It is another thing to be a person in authority providing one for an org. And kids are horrible and basically all have cameras everywhere they go. They WILL do something horrible and, depending on what that something is, you might now be liable for a lot of stuff you don’t want to be.
You don’t want that smoke. They can use google drive. Or you can talk to one of the companies that host next/own clouds for people and ask for a discount since it is the boy scouts.
Do you think “alright kids, meeting is officially over. Go home or call your parents. If anyone wants to stay we will be hanging out and teaching server stuff at ____ ‘s house for an hour or two.” Gets around this?
Homie? I want you to know that while I am going to be inflammatory, I am not insulting you. In a slightly sane world, that should be fine.
NEVER work with children. “Hey kids. You can go home or you can stay with me and a few others and learn how to use a computer!”. At best you are setting yourself up for some awkward phone calls when Little Jimmy gets caught looking at something his parents don’t approve of.
If you are a close family friend and the parents understand what you are going to be teaching their kid (and obviously want you to teach it), go for it. If you are just watching them while they eat orange slices? Don’t fucking go anywhere near that. Let the teachers who actually train in how to handle these situations do it.
And the other aspect: Kids (and most adults) are not rational or intelligent. They aren’t going to take “Hey, if Susie sends you nudes don’t put them on this server because it will get me sent to prison as a diddler” as education on why they should not fucking do that.
If you ever want to get scared straight as it were? Take a teacher out for drinks (and you better pay for them!). You’ll hear LOTS of horror stories and get even a glimpse into the kind of hell they have to put up with.
The show Black-ish (like a lot of Kenya Barris’s work) has a LOT of problems. But the number of times teacher friends have shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jqmj0ILwfM. And it is not at all exclusive to black people (or even men).
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.
This is actually really helpful for me. Thank you.
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.
When my home stuff doesn’t get eleven 9’s of reliability, I get frustrated and shut it down. But you’ve given me perspective. I feel like I’ve been pretty hard on myself because I’m comparing my personal setups to businesses/orgs.
Usually if a service of mine goes down, I’ll fix it when I or someone else needs it. I think that’s a decent approach for most personal stuff, eslecially when you have termux on your phone, becomes easy to restart stuff wherever you are.
❤️ Termux
Hetzner Storage Share
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 ♥️
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.
My nextcloud is on a relatively expensive ($5/month) VPS but I should get off my butt and move it to a $2/month one. I like to hope your organization can afford that, at least for a while. I will PM you a link where as a broke nonprofit you might be able to get a free one if you ask nicely.
I think it’s not worth trying to self-host on your own hardware unless you want to experience the hassles and headaches as a self-education or hobby goal in its own right.
I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/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.
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.
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
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?
run the nextcloud-all-in-one on an old laptop
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?)
Just a word of warning
Nextcloud is very finicky and can be prone to breakage. That’s not the say don’t use it but be realistic about the amount of work needed to maintain it.
Honestly I would just go for gsuite or office365 simply because they are less likely to break on you. It sucks that Nextcloud is a huge monolith but it is what we have.
Besides the time and responsibility of running the service, your biggest cost is going to be storage and maybe even transfer. None of the cheap VPS have big storage or bandwith, so I would not offer a service like this if I were you.
VPS is not that much, especially if you aren’t storing a ton of media. Digital Ocean and Hetzner are good places to look. This will also prevent some networking headaches you’re likely to have hosting it “on prem”.
If part of your reason for doing this is to involve the kids in the process, then it’s better to do it locally. Someone in the org has or can find an unused desktop computer that you guys can have fun with for pretty much zero cost. You will probably have trouble trying to connect to it from outside your network though.