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You can also consider hosting it at home. More than likely you've got fiber at home, with decent capacity, and you need (1) closet (2) UPS (3) static IP from ISP with a decent firewall/router. It's not ideal, but a lot cheaper and could be perfect for what you need.
https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free
I've used many other free tiers over the years (living in a low-income region you pretty much have to), and they make it difficult to fuck up your trial and go over the free limit. With GCP or AWS (especially AWS) it's trivial to start running paid resources and be surprised with a large bill at the end. Here you have to explicitly opt into it by clicking through multiple dialogs and confirming via an email link.
That's a reasonable plan. And I 100% agree that controlling your data is preferable to having it mined. What frustrates me, and why I don't do it any more, is we don't have a manageable story for most things. In many cases there's a good recipe you can follow to stand up the basic service. But hardening, security patching, etc. aren't covered. You have to come up with your own solution to make sure it's up, etc. On t…
I think part of the problem is that this is exactly the kind of stuff that is not fun. It’s that boring middle layer between the OS and apps. Compounding the problem is the fact that the people who know that layer well feel no personal need to fix its usability issues.
Programmers want to work on AI and distributed systems and games and other sexy things. Even people who work in the middle layer would rather work on sexy problems there like hyperscaling with Kubernetes and architecture as code.
Making regular old systems easy to use for boring not-hyperscale uses just isn’t sexy so open source devs don’t do it. The economic model for commercial stuff only incentivizes the leveraging of this problem for vendor lock in or to move people into SaaS where data can be mined and rent can be charged forever.
At this point the whole industry is herding everyone into SaaS walled gardens because that’s the only working economic model in software. I don’t see this changing without a movement similar to open source in its heyday in the 90s, but to steal fire from the nerds and bring it to the masses.
I’m not optimistic because nobody seems to care. It might take a whole cycle in which all freedom and privacy is completely lost. Experiences like Twitter just aren’t cutting it. People are stuck on either “woke Twitter was bad” or “pilled Elon bad” instead of realizing that the problem is intrinsic to walled gardens. All cloud spies on you and all social media is manipulating discourse for someone. No exceptions.
If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available. Everything syncs when it is in the house, which is just about always for the laptops and pretty often for the cell phones, and when it is out and about it just doesn't. It all works out. I have a backup process running on it, but back up disk space is a lot cheaper than live disk space attach…
If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available. I do the same but then have a VPN so I can reach it externally. One more thing to maintain but worth it.
Contabo user here, no complain in a couple of years using between one and two VPS. 0 downtime.
If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available. Everything syncs when it is in the house, which is just about always for the laptops and pretty often for the cell phones, and when it is out and about it just doesn't. It all works out. I have a backup process running on it, but back up disk space is a lot cheaper than live disk space attach…
Perhaps wireguard(or tailscale just for this bit). Not saying you have to, having local only as default is perfectly good and safer maybe!
1) what is your budget? 2) how much stuff are you planning on hosting? 3) how much bandwidth do you need? nextcloud was (I've not checked recently) very hard to secure properly, so you'll probably want to hide it behind a VPN or some such. The other thing to think about is the amount of time you have budgeted for initial setup, and on going maintenance. you will need to have backups, and those backups need to be test…
I've not heard of nextcloud being particularly onerous to lock down, compared to other systems of its ilk (and it should be easier than securing something string together from smaller parts). The main trick with “standard” packages like these, once you've done the initial hardening, is making sure you keep bang up-to-date with security patches from upstream.
> its car cheaper to have a low power server with a couple of big disks in it, than it would be to host that data on S3/other block storage
Though a good block storage provided should give your data more redundancy and a lower time-to-recovery than a pair of old drives in RAID1. Of course, you still want good backups on another provider, just in case.
Check performance too: some block storage providers might be notably faster (SSD/RAM cached storage etc) or much slower (mostly traditional drives, high levels of contention on the storage arrays, latency between your app and the storage array) than those inexpensive local drives.
OVH for me. I rent a bare metal server ($80/mo) for development and a use an OVH VM for my personal site. Their DDoS mitigation seems legit.
No warning that they would charge it, no pre-authorization, no grace period to rectify the problem, just shut down the servers at 2AM in the night.
Not happy to say the least.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available. I do the same but then have a VPN so I can reach it externally. One more thing to maintain but worth it.
Tailscale works great for this application.
Now I use Tailscale (which is free for a single-user account) and it works excellently, without the Cloudflare dependency. No login necessary through the browser like with Cloudflare Tunnel, because you're already authed with Tailscale on the device.