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!
Linode. I don’t trust the parent company but who can you trust? It’s super easy to setup and like $5 a month for a small scale project that isn’t mission critical.
Note: I would never use it for a paid or really important thing. If you expect your Boy Scout group to have 50,000 users one day, it’s not fit for purpose. It’s more than fine for a little league schedule or whatever.
Haven’t tried it out, but there are some free Nextcloud hosts listed on the official website.
I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/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.
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!
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.
Never heard of that, the risk of a fire certainly outweighs a “free” UPS. Good to know.
I mean, a mechanical timer costs, like, 3 bucks in any currency and lets you set charge and discharge cycles. Add 10 bucks and you have one that you can pilot via REST API.
I believe cycling and constantly discharging and charging a battery might be even worse than letting the built-in charge controller do its job and keep the charge. I’m not an expert on battery chemistry, though. All I can say, I’ve seen desktop replacements plugged in all the time and the battery at 100% and they go bad. Thinkpads and other laptops have configurable thresholds for quite some time now. And despite me using that for my last 2 laptops, the batteries still go bad eventually. It’s supposed to help, and batteries got better, but it’s a thing to factor in.
Yeah, I totally get what you mean, I am kind of expecting that aswell, but at least I know, that other scouts groups in the area already have a nextcloud and it is actively beeing used, so I have some hopes in that regard. But yeah, getting them to use something like Matrix is probably pretty unrealistic.
Since it’s a public instance you’d want to be sure to keep it pretty up-to-date with new system patches and the latest stable versions of Nextcloud. If you’re comfortable with automating updates with ansible, k8s, docker-compose, etc. then it’s not a big deal. If you’re ssh’ing to a server to manually update things then it’s going to be a lot of overhead and likely forgotten.
Old hardware may also bring its own issues and you’ll need backups especially since old hardware (especially consumer-grade stuff) can fail very unexpectedly. And providing support for users is a whole… other thing…
I like the idea of starting with the “old laptop in a basement” approach as a way to get things going to see if the service provides benefit then look to migrate to a more stable platform in the future.
Yeah, I guess the plan would be (if we decide to use an old labtop) to have a similar backup system to my home server, so one daily incremental backup with something like borgbackup to a newly bought external hard drive and automated updates using watchtower (I heard major nextcloud upgrades can be tricky though, so I an not shure if it would be a good idea to automate those). I guess it would still suck if the laptop unexpectedly failed and we would have to scramble to find new hardware though, how long would you expect an old laptop to last as a server?
Could you pay them to host it for you?
How is the other group doing it? Could you leverage any of what they’re using?
Good luck, though. I believe first-hand experience with living a self-determined life - including online services - aligns nicely with scout ideals. And trying to convey the media-literacy that allows people to make informed choices.
And I can see some benefits with having documents available to everyone, templates, and collaborate on the paperwork…
Glad to hear other groups in the area have success with Nextcloud… Another idea would be to somehow unite and share the hosting bill for a slightly bigger Nextcloud… But I still think the old laptop idea might be promising to get started… depending on the network situation in the building and whether you can make port forwards and all the things that need to be done. Just make sure to have some kind of backup strategy if you put documents there. Can’t be too hards, as Nextcloud is made for syncing data… And I wouldn’t put personal information about kids there unless the admin knows what they’re doing.
The “old laptop” method is only feasible when it’s a personal service. You don’t want people (non-techie adults in leadership positions, especially) expecting AWS/MS/Google-equivalent availability and performance, only to find out that a busted laptop is the only thing keeping their data in place. It’s not a good solution for a non-familial organization, and not a good look to leadership.
Your VPS idea would be better.
Idk. Really depends on what you put there. And Nextcloud does file sync. Even if the server coughs up and becomes unavailable, you’d still have your directories and calendar on your devices. Just collaborating and uploading stuff won’t work.
And creativity and problem-solving are core scout skills, so I guess bulding that thing for no money would be an interesting exercise in that. Though you’re right. At some point you’ll have to think about maintainability and reliability. I guess that wouldn’t stop me from starting the project, but everyone has to decide for themselves.
Having been involved with many youth groups as a kid, including BSA, a not-insignificant amount of the leaders were - for lack of better word - idiots.
I don’t think the BSA compare to the major German scouting associations. Different organization structure and substantially different ideology and activities. Also none of the big controversies surrounding the BSA. But I suppose idiots are everywhere, at least that’s my general life experience 😅 It is very unfortunate once they start to ruin things.
run the nextcloud-all-in-one on an old laptop
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.
Hetzner Storage Share
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.
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 @[email protected] 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.
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
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
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.
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 ♥️
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.
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.
I personally would advise against gsuite and office356 as well as it’s currently debated whether they can be used in accordance to the GDPR. That’s not stopping institutions and organizations… Both are very popular products, but I’d be cautious and not put any sensitive stuff or personal stuff or pictures there. And not hand out logins to other people, especially not minors.
There’s no “debate” about Office or G-suite and GDPR, what are you talking about?
Well, for once you need a commissioned data processing contract with Microsoft to let Microsoft (a third party) process your users private data. And probably a case-by-case study as Office365/Teams/… consists of a wide variety of different services and products and has lots of configurable options as well. And then we had the Datenschutzkonferenz come to the conclusion Office365 is not allowed in 2022. And it got messy after that. A big debate. The EU and several German states and different institutions doing reviews over the years and coming to different (sometimes opposing) conclusions. And the law concerning data safe harbour / EU data boundary got updated. And we have 2025 now and the situation in the US changes daily. On the upside I believe they’ve all renewed the Data Privacy Framework certifications so it’s legally possible to use the services. But I don’t think the debate is solved or over yet. And you’ll get some 50+ pages PDF instructions on how to configure your company/organization’s cloud office to be in line.
I suppose it’s similar for Google? But I see less professional use of their cloud services, I believe it’s more popular with smaller organizations and individuals. Honestly I don’t know much about that one, I’ve never considered Google for data that need protection, as that company is one of the largest data leeches on earth.
In any case OP needs to qualify for their NGO programs, as both Google and Microsoft cost about $1,000 a year for like 15 people and that’s well above their weight. And GDPR compliance for group members and commissioned data processing is a business feature, that’s not in your average private (free) Google account.
Other than that, you can google “office365 gdpr” (or dsgvo) if you haven’t heard of it yet and see all the different opinions out there.
So……no, there’s no debate about what you said there is debate around - GDPR.
Your cost estimates are incredibly wrong btw. Microsoft offer Microsoft 356 Business Basic for non-profits up to 300 users for free, including 1TB of OneDrive storage.
