do not spend “innovation points” on anything that isn’t your core competency, period.
that doesn’t only apply to google workspace, it also applies to things like payment processing, auth, etc.
Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#12Has anyone used Perforce Helix for this?
If you're already using it for large file version control for, e.g., gamedev, and don't mind the cost, how well does it work to store all other company documents? I'd assume it has better scalability and permissions management than Nextcloud (not to mention the version control on par with git).
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#13No it really is not. Just pay for Microsoft Onedrive for your users.
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#14Hetzner has an affordable hosted offering of Nextcloud which we use at our company: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#15Self-hosting is no big deal but NextCloud -- from what I've seen -- is not very good. Used by the German government is not the recommendation you might think it is.
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#16Has anyone used Perforce Helix for this? If you're already using it for large file version control for, e.g., gamedev, and don't mind the cost, how well does it work to store all other company documents? I'd assume it has better scalability and permissions management than Nextcloud (not to mention the version control on par with git).
it works quite good. Used it in my previous gig. All documentstion and design libraries of the company (of 100+ people) were in Perforce. Everything was on AWS.
It's a joy to browse the design library and do code reviews with Swarm as a plus.
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#17I think so but there are generally two competing philosophies. One is that startups should leverage cloud services as much as possible because of their relatively low resources required to get off the ground.
I think selfhosting open-source services is more useful for niche SMB's that specifically require on-prem data.
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand the attitude, but personally I don't second it. I think the better question is: Do you care enough to divert some time away from building your product? Some folks might be really motivated by not going with Google Workspace. Others don't care at all. There can be great motivational effects in doing what you think is right, I wouldn't discount it as a purely economical decision. Sure, tools need to be…
There’s also the leadership capital lens - you will 100% annoy a significant percentage of the org implementing a non standard data solution. That will come back to bite you down the line. Choose your battles.
Depends on your workers and also the kind of company you are. If you're building a privacy-conscious product and you've recruited people that share the same values, they'd applaud you not going for a cloud solution. I certainly would.
I think this viewpoint would be more common here in Europe.
And our conpany's O365 also has significant downtime. We've had several major incidents in the last months alone (one of which was the crowdstrike related one, which we don't use but apparently Microsoft do)
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#19If you are going by the Nextcloud route, they have an enterprise solution[0] and you can pay a bit to them to avoid some worries.
IMHO, having the diversity in storage and computing would help the current tech world a lot.
Re: Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?
#20At our startup, we rely on nextcloud (self hosted on a root server from a German hosting provider) + libre office for all of the more „mundane“ parts of our business. To be fair though, we’re in a very niche market (offshore wind) running at a very different speed compared to your regular startup. It’s been a conscious choice to run everything on foss and self host as much as we can. Big plus for nextcloud: the sync client works reliably even on intermittent and extremely slow connections (offshore). The overhead of maintaining nextcloud ourselves is manageable (yet another docker container) and it’s been astonishingly reliable ever since we got started. For us, maintaining control over data is paramount, so it matters greatly to us. If one day the overhead should become too much, I’d probably move our nextcloud over to a nextcloud provider.