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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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I tried to selfhost Nextcloud at work (feddit.it)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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And it failed spectacularly.

We only needed a simple form, but we wanted to be fancy, so we used "nextcloud forms".

The docker image automatically updated the install to nextcloud 30, but the forms app requires nextcloud 29 or lower. No warning whatsoever. It's an official app, couldn't they wait that it was ready for NC 30 before launching it? The newsletter boasts "NC hub 9 is the best thing after sliced bread" yet i don't see any difference both in visual or performance compared to NC hub 2

Conclusion: we made our business to rely on nextcloud forms as a signup form, but the only reason we were using it was disabled who knows how many weeks ago.

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[–] Zak 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.

Even then, it's likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there's a problem, it's your problem. I don't want to discourage you, but understand what you're committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

That reminds me of work. I'm old, young me has been through the mistakes and the pain of wanting to control and self-host everything.

Now I manage a team of young idealists who have not yet been burned sufficiently hard by reality and I feel like I spend half of my time denying them permission to add new self-hosted services to our stack.

Just last month a young padawan was pissed at the spent on an external auth service and had been pushing hard for a self hosted OSS solution which he was convinced he could handle by himself (which was most likely true, from a purely technical standpoint).

Since he wouldn't let it go, I "punished" him by having him spend one day in excel and powerpoint to prepare a cost benefit analysis to present to the architecture review board, including server cost, backups, redundancy, security, monitoring, pen-testing, auditing, his time and all the bells and whistles we needed to be compliant with all the ISO-x we have to be. (we're in a banking related field).

Our estimated internal cost ended up about 6x the one of the SASS solutions and still wasn't as reliable.

Most people don't understand the amount of effort it requires to run a secure & reliable system and if I had a dollar for everytime I heard it's as simple as "docker run", I could retire early.