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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?

#51

Post by ensignavenger »

stego-tech wrote: post #21

Old school dinosaur that still advocates for private cloud solutions, here. Swallow your pride or curiosity on rolling your own kit and accept the reality that OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/Box.com/et al are going to be better for your needs. The single biggest benefit of SaaS products are their flexibility to provide service when you can't or don't want to support the deployments yourselves, which is basically start…

There are plenty of companies that will host Nextcloud for you if you don't want to handle it yourself.

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

#52

Post by ensignavenger »

There are companies that will host and support Nextcloud for you, so it does not necessarily mean any additional burden on Dev-ops than any proprietary Sass solution. And if your provider doesn't meet expectations (or stops meeting them) you can migrate to a new one with less difficulty than changing software completely, as you would with proprietary Sass.

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

#53

Post by RevEng »

sgarland wrote: post #43
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…

I don't disagree - there are people who are capable and willing to put in the effort. But I don't think that's most people - especially people asking how to do it. There's a lot to know about how to do things properly, so if you don't have at least one person who has been there and done that, I think it's not worth the effort.

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

#54

Post by Brian_K_White »

stego-tech wrote: post #21

Old school dinosaur that still advocates for private cloud solutions, here. Swallow your pride or curiosity on rolling your own kit and accept the reality that OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/Box.com/et al are going to be better for your needs. The single biggest benefit of SaaS products are their flexibility to provide service when you can't or don't want to support the deployments yourselves, which is basically start…

https://ziglang.org/news/migrate-to-self-hosting/

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

#55

Post by stego-tech »

ensignavenger wrote: post #51
stego-tech wrote: post #21

Old school dinosaur that still advocates for private cloud solutions, here. Swallow your pride or curiosity on rolling your own kit and accept the reality that OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/Box.com/et al are going to be better for your needs. The single biggest benefit of SaaS products are their flexibility to provide service when you can't or don't want to support the deployments yourselves, which is basically start…

There are plenty of companies that will host Nextcloud for you if you don't want to handle it yourself.

True, but now you've got to take the time to manage a non-standard groupware and collaboration suite from the perspective of an administrator, as well as onboarding your staff to something they're unlikely to be familiar with. All of this costs time, which startups don't necessarily have or is better spent trying to grow the business or solving harder/more pressing problems.

Look, my job would be a lot more lucrative if I could convince the C-Suite to self-host everything on-prem again. The reality is that startups need to run lean and mean until they've got reliable revenue coming in, and this is where "off-the-shelf" solutions are going to win out over bespoke offerings.

Is it doable? Sure. Is it affordable? You betcha. Is it sensible for a startup? I'd probably say no.

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

#56

Post by Brian_K_White »

ensignavenger wrote: post #52

There are companies that will host and support Nextcloud for you, so it does not necessarily mean any additional burden on Dev-ops than any proprietary Sass solution. And if your provider doesn't meet expectations (or stops meeting them) you can migrate to a new one with less difficulty than changing software completely, as you would with proprietary Sass.

I think this is the best of both worlds. You can be as hands off as you want today, yet still have all the same ultimate control benefits as self hosting.

Give that 5th or 6th 9 it's proper due (almost none almost always) and life gets quite simple and manageable and efficient and your tools provide value instead of extracting it.

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

#57

Post by stego-tech »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #54
stego-tech wrote: post #21

Old school dinosaur that still advocates for private cloud solutions, here. Swallow your pride or curiosity on rolling your own kit and accept the reality that OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/Box.com/et al are going to be better for your needs. The single biggest benefit of SaaS products are their flexibility to provide service when you can't or don't want to support the deployments yourselves, which is basically start…

https://ziglang.org/news/migrate-to-self-hosting/

Preaching to the choir! I love the convenience of public cloud offerings, but unless you're billing a customer for your consumption + margin or hosting something itsy-bitsy that can fit into burstable or low-resource instances, it's undoubtedly going to be cheaper on-prem or self-hosted in the long (3+ years) term.

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

#58

Post by ensignavenger »

stego-tech wrote: post #55
ensignavenger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of companies that will host Nextcloud for you if you don't want to handle it yourself.

True, but now you've got to take the time to manage a non-standard groupware and collaboration suite from the perspective of an administrator, as well as onboarding your staff to something they're unlikely to be familiar with. All of this costs time, which startups don't necessarily have or is better spent trying to grow the business or solving harder/more pressing problems. Look, my job would be a lot more lucrative…

I'm not sure what you mean by "nonstandard". Next loud implements standards like webdav, carddav, caldav, email (smtp, etc) and others.

Your staff may be familiar with Office365, Google Workspaces, Nextcloud, or any number of solutions, or none at all. So you will still have to leovide some level of training and support.

Not being locked in provides startups with ghe flexability they need, and the standards Nextcloud implements makes it even more flexible.

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

#59

Post by stego-tech »

ensignavenger wrote: post #58
stego-tech wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but now you've got to take the time to manage a non-standard groupware and collaboration suite from the perspective of an administrator, as well as onboarding your staff to something they're unlikely to be familiar with. All of this costs time, which startups don't necessarily have or is better spent trying to grow the business or solving harder/more pressing problems. Look, my job would be a lot more lucrative…

I'm not sure what you mean by "nonstandard". Next loud implements standards like webdav, carddav, caldav, email (smtp, etc) and others. Your staff may be familiar with Office365, Google Workspaces, Nextcloud, or any number of solutions, or none at all. So you will still have to leovide some level of training and support. Not being locked in provides startups with ghe flexability they need, and the standards Nextcloud…

You're right, and I should clarify: non-standard from the perspective of an AMER Enterprise IT Engineer, and specifically from a talent acquisition perspective. I don't doubt you could train staff in NextCloud's offerings, but again, the point I was making is that it's probably not the best solution for a startup if you want to make sure time is spent solving the challenges of your product, rather than the challenges of the underlying corporate kit you've chosen to adopt.

As for locked-in..._eh_, that's both fair (Google and Microsoft both have abysmal data exfil capabilities) but not as valid as it used to be (there are gobs of startups whose entire schtick is automating your exit strategy from a "locked-in" vendor). By the time vendor lock-in for your corporate IT is a concern, you've likely got the capital to splash on an actual, dedicated Enterprise IT team.

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

#60

Post by ryukoposting »

I've worked at multiple small companies now where all our document storage and organization needs were met exclusively by GDrive.

I won't say it's a good solution for everyone. If you have strict documentation needs for industry reasons, it's going to be hell for your workers. Good luck finding anything you need. Good luck getting people to follow a consistent format, or hell, even a compliant format.

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