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Cloud machines for something like this would be >$100 a month.
What security measures and other considerations would I need to keep in mind if I go this route?
For example I have a Emailer service that sends updates to users (needs to connect to my remote hosted DB)
It depends who you ask.
I do the same at home and it works like a charm, but I have no users beside myself and my SO.
If you have paying users and SLAs you'd better get that $100/month cloud machine or have a disaster recovery plan ready (and tested).
> What security measures and other considerations would I need to keep in mind if I go this route?
the usuals... disable password authentication, configure the firewall, do not share /var/run/docker.sock with containers, don't shut down SELinux, run periodic backups and test recovery procedures periodically etc.. Normal sysadmin stuff.
NextCloud is your data on your hardware.
Encrypt it, back it up to the cloud (someone else's computer) as offsite storage, but don't give read/write access to your calendar, contacts and emails.
Hardware dies unpredictably. The cloud providers have figured out how to be highly resilient to it.
If you use your own hardware, there's a XX% chance you're going to have a really bad day sometime in the next year.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but I feel like the main reasons to choose cloud over self-host are availability and bandwidth. The data center is probably more reliable for uptime than your home. If neither of those are your problem, then I suppose you should consider segregating the network that machine is running on from the rest of your devices in your home. So your server can't connect to your TV in the living r…
For most people their internet service is not that fast... If people like that got their wish they would wind up praying that their web site never gets on Hacker News, or they will after the first time it does.
But the bottleneck will quickly become bandwidth for anything with users other than you.
If it's just for you and you have the hour or so per week to dedicate to updates and maintenance, then I don't see why not. I run two servers in my room and they've worked fine with minimal maintenance so far, except for a few old hard drives that needed replacing and a fan that I couldn't get replaced because of a screw I stripped years ago.
There are quite decent cloud machines out there if you just look beyond the big guys like AWS and GCloud. https://contabo.com/en/vps/ has decent servers for cheap, as does https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
If your emailer service makes direct contact with destination SMTP servers, then running from home is probably not an option. If you use an external SMTP server to deliver mail to the destination servers then this won't be a problem.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but I feel like the main reasons to choose cloud over self-host are availability and bandwidth. The data center is probably more reliable for uptime than your home. If neither of those are your problem, then I suppose you should consider segregating the network that machine is running on from the rest of your devices in your home. So your server can't connect to your TV in the living r…
Even back in the 1990s I had so many friends who were obsessed with the idea of running a web site from a server at home. For most people their internet service is not that fast... If people like that got their wish they would wind up praying that their web site never gets on Hacker News, or they will after the first time it does.
Yes. NextCloud is your data on your hardware. Encrypt it, back it up to the cloud (someone else's computer) as offsite storage, but don't give read/write access to your calendar, contacts and emails.