I started running a self hosted Nextcloud instance last year, and I couldn’t be happier with it! This release sounds exciting, guess it’s time to go upgrade :)
For those looking to ‘de-Google’ their lives, and control their own data Nextcloud is one of the best options out there.
Very easy to setup and maintain with a dedicated unraid box. Grab an old dell enterprise server like the r210 II and put some WD reds in raid + zfs, install unraid, and it’s good to go.
I actually virtualize unraid within esxi so that one small 1U box can be my router / firewall and an unraid machine serving home services. Best setup I’ve ever had and learned so much along the way!
This sounds interesting, might have to look into it. Running a physical home server would be awesome, but it currently sounds above my skill level as far as hardware and networking :)
I run a cheap EC2 instance, and plug it into an S3 bucket for file storage, and my RDS MySQL database.
How do you deal with the high costs of running an RDS instance? I think almost $30 p/m is a bit high for a small single family NC instance, when the EC2 instance running the actual service is going to a fraction of that.
That's a good question. Yeah, maybe not the best setup for everyone. You are right, the cost of a t3.small on-demand is close to $30/month, just for your NC instance alone that's not worth it.
In my case, for purposes of hobby projects and various self hosted services, I keep both MySQL & Postgres RDS instances running in perpetuity, both t3a.micro. On demand pricing is roughly $13/month, but since I plan on keeping them running 'forever' I purchase reserved instances. For a 3 year plan, 'no-upfront', this brings the cost down to about $8.75/month. Much more palatable if you ask me :)
Also, I use them for multiple projects, so the convenience factor is worth it for me. For your NC alone, I imagine it would be good enough to just run you DB server on the same EC2 instance. I doubt the database storage would eat up much disk space.
You could however, rip through a ton of disk space from file storage, so I feel like S3 buckets are a must, and cheap anyway.
To echo what the other replies are saying: mine has been running on a DigitalOcean droplet since early 2019 and I only had to reboot it once.
It syncs everything, the iOS app and web dashboard are adequate. I would recommend it (but I haven't tried anything else, other than Google Drive or Dropbox, of course)
Droplets are great, and I like the ease of use of Digital Ocean. But, as far as server backups go, I've never liked managing these, so I use an external data store and DB server. In my case, my instance is wired up to an Amazon S3 bucket, and an RDS database. If you set it up this way, there is no need to worry about backups of the application server.
I could nuke the app server, change hosting providers, or if there was a hardware failure or whatever, it won't matter. I can always spin up a fresh server, and plug back into my external DB and data store.
I think my instance is 3-4 years old at this point and I am impressed by how little work I had to put into it over the years. I set it up using Snap and it auto updates so the whole process is quite carefree.
For those looking to ‘de-Google’ their lives, and control their own data Nextcloud is one of the best options out there.