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

When I worked at a smallish company, we were upgrading our email calendaring system from a homegrown thing to some better.

In my young year I was pushing for something like this, an off the shelf self hosted system. I was worried that slinging it out to a thirdparty would be both expensive and bad for my career.

However I was wrong. Much as it was a dick to set up, migrating to Google (workspace? fuck knows what it was called) was totally worth the money.

At newer companies I've look at self hosting, but I just don't want to be on the hook for securing the stuff, or dealing with the email deliverability when some marketing prick does something stupid.

gjsman-1000 · a year ago

I love many things about the hacker ethos, but after being in tech for several years, I’ve learned the following painful lesson:

Do not self host. The only thing you should ever self host is software your company wrote; unless you have a dedicated team for that specific piece of software alone.

You will never meet the uptime of Google Workspace. Your tools will never have less bugs. You will never meet the security certifications. Your real-time document editing, which may you think doesn’t matter, will never meet your employee’s expectations. You will never have as good tools for automated legal compliance. And if it goes down, which it will, even a day of downtime is more expensive than years of Google Workspace in all but the smallest of businesses. Additionally, every time something doesn’t work (or, heaven forbid, you’ve been hacked), your company’s employees and lawyers can and will blame you instead of an unmovable entity.

iforgotpassword · a year ago

> Additionally, every time something doesn’t work (or, heaven forbid, you’ve been hacked), your company’s employees and lawyers can and will blame you instead of an unmovable entity.

That's what it's really about. Modern day "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It's not about the better solution, it's about blaming someone else if things go wrong.

Azure has been completely hacked twice now, yet people still move their shit over to Microsoft's cloud offerings. I don't understand how fucked in the brain you have to be to consider this a good idea, except for being able to shift blame.

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bitwarders · a year ago

No one ever got fired for choosing ... The Cloud

Do you want to spend your time building your product, or spend your time managing something you get for $10/mo from Google?

fhd2 · a year ago

I can understand the attitude, but personally I don't second it.

I think the better question is: Do you care enough to divert some time away from building your product?

Some folks might be really motivated by not going with Google Workspace. Others don't care at all. There can be great motivational effects in doing what you think is right, I wouldn't discount it as a purely economical decision. Sure, tools need to be efficient, but we also need to enjoy them.

serjester · a year ago

There’s also the leadership capital lens - you will 100% annoy a significant percentage of the org implementing a non standard data solution. That will come back to bite you down the line. Choose your battles.

jstummbillig · a year ago

If you care less about spending any amount of time on your product than whatever it is you emotionally get out of hosting Nextcloud instead of using Google Workspace, beware.

This is not about Nextcloud vs GW. The spooky bit is that you consider taking on additional burden with something that will not improve your product in any way, when your product is the only reason why your startup maybe exists in the future.

That's a particularly dangerous habit to pick up, because you will have 1000 chances to make meaningless decisions and distract yourself every day.

Unless you have an extremely convincing reason to do something — and if you are wondering, you don't — don't.

righthand · a year ago

First to market/move fast mentality will never consider it. And it’s usually over something that doesn’t really matter like this. Let people have their nextcloud!

aborsy · a year ago

EU is worried about the European data stored in US (for good reasons). They don’t want their digital assets leave the region, even if the American services are good.

The price is also not $10 per month. You have to increasingly upgrade for features that Nextcloud offers for free, particularly if they are used by enterprise (like multi user accounts).

pointlessone · a year ago

You can get Storage Box from Hetzner for like €10. It’s a simple Samba/WebDAV/SFTP network drive and works fine. Nothing fancy, just storage.

XCSme · a year ago

> or spend your time managing something you get for $10/mo from Google?

Or spend your time writing privacy policies and adding 3rd party data-sharing consent banners.

stego-tech · a year ago

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 startup mode.

Once you're off your feet and have an honest-to-god Enterprise IT team with a budget, let us deal with it. They'll likely keep end-user storage in a Collab Suite (M365, GWorkspace) unless there's a specific advantage or requirement for your business needs in running it on-prem.

Everything is a tool, and the use-case of these tools is in freeing you to solve the really hard problems of startups, i.e. survival, success, and sale/solvency.

ensignavenger · a year ago

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.

Brian_K_White · a year ago

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.

lyime · a year ago

This

asa977 · a year ago

At our startup, we rely on nextcloud (self hosted on a root server from a German hosting provider) + libre office for all of the more „mundane“ parts of our business. To be fair though, we’re in a very niche market (offshore wind) running at a very different speed compared to your regular startup. It’s been a conscious choice to run everything on foss and self host as much as we can. Big plus for nextcloud: the sync client works reliably even on intermittent and extremely slow connections (offshore). The overhead of maintaining nextcloud ourselves is manageable (yet another docker container) and it’s been astonishingly reliable ever since we got started. For us, maintaining control over data is paramount, so it matters greatly to us. If one day the overhead should become too much, I’d probably move our nextcloud over to a nextcloud provider.

> I’d probably move our nextcloud over to a nextcloud provider.

I recently moved (from Contabo to Hetzner), and I struggled to migrate NextCloud. I ended up creating a new Nextcloud container and re-uploading the files. I did have some more unique setup (trying to move from Caprover to Coolify, and the Coolify NextCloud image was using sqlite instead of MySQL for the NC database). If you migrate, just make sure to back-up the files locally first in a different folder, because the server is authoritative, so if on the new server the files are missing, they will also be deleted locally.

It's nice to hear you are dedicated to self-hosting. If you ever need a self-hosted Hotjar alternative, check out my UXWizz platform :)

KaiserPro · a year ago

babelfish · a year ago

All you have to do is read the commentary here to know this probably isn’t a good idea in a large work setting unless you have dedicated IT staff to support it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41615102

GTP · a year ago

Yes but, in a business environment, you need to have dedicated IT support for anything you're self-hosting. Things can go wrong even with the most stable piece of software, and you need to be ready for that. SAAS' main selling point is that they take away the maintenance burden from you, while the advantage of self-hosting is that you're the one in control, at the expense of having to maintain the thing yourself. Then some softwares can require more maintenance than others, but needing IT staff if you're self-hosting isn't specific to Nextcloud.

amelius · a year ago

Most large organizations don't even allow the use of gmail, let alone employees storing work-related data in someone else's cloud.

lenova · a year ago

OwnCloud is popular in the /r/selfhosted scene on reddit, and is worth doing a search there: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/search?q=owncloud

OwnCloud and such wouldn't be considered a mainstream resume skill, and comes with its own upkeep and maintenance, along with ownership of the entire backup/restoration process.

moooo99 · a year ago

Driven by my ideals and my previous horrendous experience dealing with Microsoft and Google support, I've been a strong advocate for self-hosting in my organization. I do not think companies should put something as valuable as their collaboration and communication in the hands of a company as inconsistent as Google or Microsoft.

However, ideals aside. In many large companies, using Microsoft or Google products can also be a compliance headache (that is, if you're outside the US). A larger corp is more likely to be hit with such issues than a small startup.

Also, self hosting of course requires resources. I'm not talking about compute, in my experience that is very negligible. It of course requires people to keep stuff up to date and learn how to use it to its fullest extent. A larger enterprise can more easily afford this effort than a small startup. Even considering my idealistic stance, it is hard to ignore the low cost of entry as well as the ease of getting started with the big cloud offers.

j3s · a year ago

do not spend “innovation points” on anything that isn’t your core competency, period.

that doesn’t only apply to google workspace, it also applies to things like payment processing, auth, etc.

Although true in most cases, a lot of great products appeared first as internal tools.