What do you think is the best (and cheapest) way to host a new nextcloud instance and website for my local scouts organisation?

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.

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.

Honestly, I would go with a managed Nextcloud solution like Hetzner Storage Share or another reputable provider. No hassle of updating and securing the server, no data stored at Google or Microsoft, and easy to administrate by people who aren't expert system administrators in case you are no longer available. I also went with that route for my personal instance because it was actually cheaper than hosting it myself on a VPS.

I wouldn't, unless you've been specifically asked by the organization to do so and given the proper authorization, legal counseling, etc, etc. Don't go looking for solutions to problems that don't exist.

Your heart is in the right place, but I'm with @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip here.

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/

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 ♥️

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.

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.

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).

run the nextcloud-all-in-one on an old laptop

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.

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.

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-domain with LDAP for users. That way you have central user management as you add new services.

Haven't tried it out, but there are some free Nextcloud hosts listed on the official website.

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.

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.

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.

If you VPS it, remember to add a snapshot backup. Such as $5 vultr VPS always add the $2 snapshot backup option.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?)

Would you believe Oracle OCI? They have an always free tier, as in you never pay. You need a valid regular credit card. At first I thought it was for a slow x86 instance, but it includes Arm hours equivalent to 4 cores, 24 GB RAM, 10TB of transfer a month, I think 200GB storage. Divide it up for an nginx reverse proxy in front of it, or HA Proxy if you are feeling ambitious.

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.