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 used a RaspberryPi 4B for about 3 years. I connected storage over USB-3 to a pair of SATA SSDs. It handled everything pretty much flawlessly for two users and half a dozen devices. We even had multiple users on Plex. dietpi was brilliant for my first home server :).
Initial uploads may be slow depending on your storage layout but in my experience the requirements are super low.
You need this for your family, and not hundreds of people? No crazy, outlandish usage requirements?
Then basically any PC will do.
before you take the jump, consider a way lighter and easier alternative - syncthing (files) and radicale (calendar, contacts). dependable, bullet-proof, super-lightweight, zero issues - everything nextcloud isn't.
I was the happiest when I finally booted nextcloud off my network, never to return.
I do regularly have issues with radicale, for years now. One is that it does not work properly after boot. I have to SSH in, kill the radicale process, and restart it.
docker?
No docker. Plain executable.
I've got a small Enterprise customer running on a Dell r710, 2gb ram to the slightly custom docker image for nc, 4gb+ for the woods sit, the other 14gb to KVM to run a windows application.
I have used it on old underpowered computers happily for years. There's just no need for anything with high specs.
i5 9th gen. 8 Seagate Ironwolf in a RaidZ2. 64GB ECC Ram. Software: TrueNAS.
I'm currently using an i5 9500 and it runs good here too.
Note for OP though: If you don't need/want transcoding it'd be way cheaper to get an equivalent AMD CPU just because motherboards are hilariously expensive for an obsolete platform.
Mine is a small N100-based machine with 2 SATA SSDs in it. 16 GB RAM and it also runs many other services.
The better the hardware and connection, the faster the interface will be.
I just bought a used Intel N100 mini pc with 16gb RAM and 2tb SSD for a little more than I would have paid for a Raspberry Pi 5 setup. It doesn’t draw much more power than a RPi, and I’m not limited to what’s available for ARM if I want to expand the install at some point.
@fdrc_ff @selfhosted
We have a Raspberry Pi 4, and its performance is totally sufficient for photo uploads, file sync, contacts, calendar, cookbook, notes, ... Don't use just the SD card, though, but an SSD.
Did you do the nextcloudpi install?
Cant answer for them, but if you use dietpi they have use the debian package set up with scripts to pull dependencies like a webserver and database automatically. It was very painless in my experience.
Same here. Works well.
My NAS, which is my old PC. Ryzen 1700 w/16 GB of RAM, which is way overkill (just need like 2 cores and 4GB RAM or so).
Hardware isn't particularly important, NC isn't all that heavy. If you're using Collabora or OnlyOffice or something, you may need to care a bit. Use what you have, and upgrade when you run into issues.
That said, I'm considering switching to Seafile because it can apparently do Collabora now. I don't use any of the NC features, I just want a Google Docs replacement.
I have a raspberry pi 4 with
Really, anything works. I use a decade old desktop that in it's prime was used for MS Office and emails, so if that thing runs smoothly, I think anything will.
My NextCloud is running on an old desktop that's been repurposed into a server. The server is running Proxmox, and NC is running in docker directly on Proxmox using the nextcloud-aio image.
Found that had better performance than running it in a VM and was less headaches than the other install options.
I keep thinking about moving it to dedicated hardware, say some sort of mini pc, but it hasn't been a high priority for me.
I do this but in a docker VM. Then I can snapshot and back it up. I haven't noticed any performance disadvantage since it's running as a KVM guest, so it's pretty much the same are running on bare metal.
When I was first playing with NC I was using a RPi3 with an external SSD for a drive. Performance was pretty good, but as soon as I tried the same setup in a VM, the performance tanked. The only way I found to avoid the performance penalty was a manual install like it was bare metal, which I didn't really want to do. My experience with such setups is that they tend to be brittle.
My understanding was that the performance penalty was caused by the chain of VMs. Proxmox --> Ubuntu VM --> Docker. I don't know enough about it to say for sure.
Yah, I don't think a Pi3 is the place to make many determinations on the efficacy of VMs vs bare metal.
Nextcloud was too high fallutin for me. I share a zfs pool with proxmox's file server appliance.
Which file server appliance is that?
Not OP but if I had to guess, probably Turnkey File Server.
Gold star for you!
My home server is a refurbished HP t630 thin client with 8 gb of ram and a 1tb SSD. I'm running various services, Nextcloud-AIO being one of them. I bought it for € 35 plus the SSD and a 4 gb ram extension. I definitely do recommend used hardware as it is usually cheaper, more powerful and more environmentally friendly than buying something new. Wouldn't trust a used SSD though.
Mine is running on a HP 600 G1 Micro Computer Mini Tower PC. Right now, less than $80 from Bezos. It's over powered for Nextcloud alone, but I've also got other services running on it, including Jellyfin.
It zips along quite nicely, but I've also followed the guides for tuning the server for best performance.
In my case, I have Nextcloud on an Ubuntu server, on an old laptop from 2008. With an Atom processor 1GHz, 1 GB of RAM and 500 GB of HDD.
My Nextcloud journey went from a Raspberry Pi 2B with a single USB HDD over a Pi 3B to a QNAP 2bay NAS on RAID 1 with a proper backup strategy including daily encrypted cloud backup. Having come to rely on the setup much more than when I was starting out playing with it years ago, I sleep much easier now. That said, I never lost any data, even on very questionable hardware without any redundancy whatsoever.
I have an 8 gig RPi4 (OS is Dietpi) with a 16 terabyte HDD for storage. No issues at all...super fast and reliable. There are great FOSS apps on F-Droid covering just about anything you'd need...the official app, cookbook, bookmarks, notes, news, etc. If you're using an HDD instead of an SSD, just make sure you have a dedicated power supply for the HDD.
For your usecase a pi should be sufficient. You can go with a pi 5 8GB and a docker install, so you can host more stuff later. I would recommend an m.2 head with an SSD instead of an SD card though. Much faster and more reliable.
Nextcloud sucks. Its better to have discreet docker services running for what you actually need vs nextcloud being a monolith of shitty plugins. As for hardware, go on eBay and buy a cheap optiplex tower. It'll get you started.
I know it's unpopular, but I'm starting to agree with you. I set up NextCloud, but I honestly don't use much of any of it. The only part I really want is the file sync and handling, as well as LibreOffice in the cloud. I don't care about the calendar, contacts sync, video chat, etc. I looked through the plugins, and the ones I tried kind of sucked. I also really don't like PHP and the Docker image is all wrong, so it's more of a pain than anything to deal with.
So I'm trying out Seafile. I didn't realize it supports Collabora CODE, so I'm going to check that out. My main hangup is the directory structure, so I'll figure out the FUSE FS thing and see if that'll work well enough for me.
I literally just want to be able to send stuff from our machines, view/edit them online quickly, and send the important stuff to an offline backup.
Who knows, maybe I'll like it, and maybe I'll come back to NextCloud. Either way, I highly recommend people try out alternatives, because there really are a lot of cool projects out there.
I switched from nextcloud to seafile. Their app has paid file search for android app. Also full text search is paid. The docker also seems to crash a lot.
I've been testing owncloud ocis and it works really well. Just trying to figure out a few things for single sign on, but the app otherwise works really well.
I had some trouble getting ocis going, and it's all overly complicated for my simple home setup, especially the file storage. What I wanted from OCIS was basically a file server, integration w/ Collabora CODE, and no messing w/ web servers (just a reverse proxy). But it seems to want to be a lot more than that.
I haven't had time to play with Seafile much, but there are already some things I don't like:
But some things I do like:
So I guess we'll see how I like it. If it works well, I may end up contributing, or maybe I'll try porting to something I like more (I do a bit of Rust as a hobby, and this could be a fun project).