Ask HN: Is Nextcloud a Great Alternative to Dropbox/Google Drive for Startups?

If you are worried about someone stealing your ideas, don't be. First, nobody cares about what you have until you make it big, which is going to happen a long time from now if ever. Second, the major services all provide enterprise deals that ensure privacy, enough that the largest companies in the world and many governments rely on them. You are far more likely to be hacked if you try to roll your own than if you use a popular service - especially if you aren't an experienced IT admin.

If you are in a start-up you want to put your full focus on your product - don't waste time on infrastructure. Use popular online services, use popular brands for hardware, use popular languages and popular libraries. Use anything you can to get you going as quickly and as painlessly as possible so you can focus on building your product and your business. That's going to be hard enough.

I say this as someone who worked with a start-up from inception to being acquired 10 years later. I was the guy building the networks and the servers and the desktops. We cobbled together our own systems from white box parts and using free software that required lots of setup and maintenance. I spent a lot of my time maintaining that stuff instead of working on our products. When we got acquired, the first thing they did was throw all that stuff out and switch to their existing systems that were all the well regarded name brands that you know. Since then, everything just works.

This is not about Nextcloud vs GW. The spooky bit is that you consider taking on additional burden with something that will not improve your product in any way, when your product is the only reason why your startup maybe exists in the future.

That's a particularly dangerous habit to pick up, because you will have 1000 chances to make meaningless decisions and distract yourself every day.

Unless you have an extremely convincing reason to do something — and if you are wondering, you don't — don't.

If you self-host for a business, and your self-hosted instance is hacked when other self-hosted instances of the same software weren’t, you are at risk for legal action and a possible criminal investigation. Was it really the software that was hacked, or were you negligent? Was it truly an accident, or did you have malicious intent? Plus, define negligent - does not having a service like CrowdStrike installed count? (You might say, “obviously not,” but if it takes $50K to convince the court on that point, shallow victory there.)

If you have a family, even if this is only a 10% chance of happening, you would have to be, in your own words, “fucked in the brain” to put your livelihood and career on the line to save a few bucks.

In my ideal world, beer would rain from sky and nobody would ever get drunk. We’re not in an ideal world, and “CYA” is a valid reason until you have a proper, large, dedicated IT team.