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

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

#41

Post by bitwarders »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #9
KaiserPro wrote: post #8

When I worked at a smallish company, we were upgrading our email calendaring system from a homegrown thing to some better. In my young year I was pushing for something like this, an off the shelf self hosted system. I was worried that slinging it out to a thirdparty would be both expensive and bad for my career. However I was wrong. Much as it was a dick to set up, migrating to Google (workspace? fuck knows what it w…

I love many things about the hacker ethos, but after being in tech for several years, I’ve learned the following painful lesson: Do not self host. The only thing you should ever self host is software your company wrote; unless you have a dedicated team for that specific piece of software alone. You will never meet the uptime of Google Workspace. Your tools will never have less bugs. You will never meet the security c…

No one ever got fired for choosing ... The Cloud

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

#42

Post by bitwarders »

jstummbillig wrote: post #28
fhd2 wrote: post #3

Earlier 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…

If you care less about spending any amount of time on your product than whatever it is you emotionally get out of hosting Nextcloud instead of using Google Workspace, beware. 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. Th…

Also, while this decision is easy, other choices are nuanced. Kubernetes or EC2 or managed containers or Firebase? I say there is no clear winner for all use cases. But if you are spending innovation tokens (or fractions of) all the time these choices get even more muddy.

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

#43

Post by sgarland »

RevEng wrote: post #24

Running a service is one thing. Keeping it reliable and secure is another. Especially if you are a start-up. You have limited capital and even more limited developer time. Don't waste either on building your own infrastructure. 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, th…

This advice is repeated constantly, and it’s taken as gospel.

If you / your team know what you’re doing, you can absolutely run your own stuff without it being a nightmare. I’ve worked at a 9-digit-ARR SaaS where we ran our own servers (as in, we owned physical servers, not a VPS), ran our own networks, etc. Everything was in IaC. There were shockingly few incidents compared to literally every other SaaS I’ve worked at since.

We didn’t self-host email / file sharing, to be clear – that’s a fool’s errand due to IP reliability rules. Google Workspace is great.

I’m not trying to specifically call you out here, I’m just trying to counter the general argument that it’s impossible to do what the big providers do while still having a reliable service.

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

#44

Post by sellmesoap »

I see a lot of comments shying away from self hosting, to keep focused on your own product, or wanting the ability to shift blame onto the big providers when things go sideways. There are hosted Next Cloud options, has anyone had experience with these good or bad?

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

#45

Post by robolange »

sellmesoap wrote: post #44

I see a lot of comments shying away from self hosting, to keep focused on your own product, or wanting the ability to shift blame onto the big providers when things go sideways. There are hosted Next Cloud options, has anyone had experience with these good or bad?

My main desire in trying NextCloud was syncing files with a handful of people, as a free software replacement for Dropbox. All of the other features were nice to haves.

I've tried several of the "budget" NextCloud hosts. I'm not going to name names, but all of them were very disappointing. File syncing frequently broke in hard to diagnose ways. And from a perspective of overall service, I would get 502s, 503s, or 504s far more often that I should have. This was with multiple budget providers. I didn't try any of the more expensive providers, because I couldn't afford it, so maybe this is a "get what you pay for" situation... But in theory, the size servers I was paying for should have been able to handle our traffic volume.

Anyway, after a couple of years of trying to make hosted NextCloud work for us, I gave up and bought Dropbox's paid service and haven't had any issues with it.

We use Cryptomator on top of Dropbox to ensure data privacy, by the way. Back when we were using NextCloud, we had been using their end to end encryption plugin until we discovered a silent failure mode in which it was uploading documents in plaintext to the "encrypted" folder. I believe nowadays the recommendation even for NextCloud is to use Cryptomator on top, rather than their built-in encryption.

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

#46

Post by XCSme »

babelfish wrote: post #2

Do you want to spend your time building your product, or spend your time managing something you get for $10/mo from Google?

> or spend your time managing something you get for $10/mo from Google?

Or spend your time writing privacy policies and adding 3rd party data-sharing consent banners.

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

#47

Post by XCSme »

j3s wrote: post #11

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.

Although true in most cases, a lot of great products appeared first as internal tools.

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

#48

Post by johnchristopher »

preya2k wrote: post #32

In my opinion it’s not a good alternative if you or your team members expect exactly the same quality of service. When you switch to Nextcloud you’ll have to expect more bugs, less reliability, less performance and obviously more maintenance (since it's typically self-hosted) compared to Google Drive, Dropbox or One Drive. So you'll have to go into this with a different kind of mindset. What you gain is independence,…

> - Nextcloud (aka Collabora) Office is very slow if you want to actually work collaboratively with it (no matter the power of your Collabora server) – unfortunately it's no match for Google Docs or Office 365

What about onlyoffice ?

Can you confirm your experience comes from a nextcloud instance and a collabora instance on two different servers ? What was the bottleneck ? Network traffic ?

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

#49

Post by XCSme »

asa977 wrote: post #20

At 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…

> I’d probably move our nextcloud over to a nextcloud provider.

I recently moved (from Contabo to Hetzner), and I struggled to migrate NextCloud. I ended up creating a new Nextcloud container and re-uploading the files. I did have some more unique setup (trying to move from Caprover to Coolify, and the Coolify NextCloud image was using sqlite instead of MySQL for the NC database). If you migrate, just make sure to back-up the files locally first in a different folder, because the server is authoritative, so if on the new server the files are missing, they will also be deleted locally.

It's nice to hear you are dedicated to self-hosting. If you ever need a self-hosted Hotjar alternative, check out my UXWizz platform :)

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

#50

Post by orwin »

It really depends. At my first job it was used with some success, but we were a PaaS, with few employees and a hard limit on costs (at least the two first years, then we were profitable enough to probably upgrade but it was integrated enough). It was just after they forked themselves too, so it wasn't as feature-complete as now.

Now, I would not use it unless you have to follow ISO norms/get governmental agreements for any company with enough money. If you're a three-person startup with one client barely paying two salaries, trying to find a bigger market though, go for it.

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