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?any advice for a complete noob who wants to migrate to self-hosted nextcloud
Dear all,
I'd like to migrate from Google mail/calendar/docs to a personal nextcloud instance and self-hosted mail server. In the future I'm hoping to move over to the Purism Librem phone, so, without wanting to sound like a member of the knit-your-own-cheese brigade, I'd like to already have moved my life out of the Google ecosystem before it arrives. The best/cheapest way to do this appears to be with a low end VPS.
My impression is that for my personal (light) use 512Mb RAM, 50GB HDD, and 500GB bandwidth would suffice to get started with, but I'd love something I could cheaply increase to twice that if my family members wanted to migrate to it (unlikely, but possible they'd like to try).
My computing ability is very much "see it on youtube, have a go...". My ability to migrate once I've committed to a provider may be limited. I'd like to choose well!
Some of the available deals seem amazing if underpowered (e.g.: liteserver's 128mb ram/100GB SSD for £16/yr). Please may I ask if my assessment of my needs seems within the realm of normality, and if so, which providers anyone might recommend? I'd ideally like something in Europe for < $30/yr. I'd be happy to pay for a few years up front if that helps at all.
Yours faithfully and with apologies if there's already a guide for finding a provider (I looked but couldn't really find anything that would help me discriminate meaningfully!),
Al
Comments
With these 2 questions answered, you would get more favourable responses / offers.
Excellent point; post updated, thank you.
Ideal region: Europe
Starting budget: < $30/yr
Unlikely to get 50GB SSD for <$30/yr unless OpenVZ and oversold. You should consider HDD with that requirement and budget.
I think you're referring to their OVZ offering; for various reasons, I'd rather go with a KVM.
Ah rgr thankyou again! post changed to HDD. I got the impression OVZ was more bang for my buck; is it a security thing? should I got for KVM if I'm backing up all my documents to it?
OVZ is cheap but is just a container and shares the same EOL kernel with everyone on the server. With KVM you have more control and can encrypt your virtual disk.
It's possible Nextcloud does it's own encryption on file level which would make it a bit more safer to store it on OpenVZ.
I can do a KVM with 1GB RAM and 100GB HDD for $36/year in the UK if you are interested.
If you are a completely noob, don't follow the route of your own mailserver. If you don't want to use gmail, then, chose some really cheap alternatives from small but respected members of let, like MXroute.
As of Nextcloud, you could start with a cheap shared plan from members like BuyShared or Pageclick and setup via softaculous a next cloud server there.
Very interested! Please may I ask how much it would be if it was just 50GB HDD, and how much in the future (just very roughly) it'd likely be to upgrade to 50GB SSD?
Oh right - thankyou - I'll read about softaculous and review!
Disk encryption on KVM is a nice exercise but in the end it's nothing but a tiny hurdle and gives a false sense of security.
@starbuck if you plan to store any kind of sensitive material you really should encrypt it client side. Everything else is snake oil.
That's it, that's my new motto.
I think that's HDD, and it's intended as a storage plan, if it's from here.
That is pretty easy within your budget. It's a lot harder with pure SSD.
I've played around a little with encrypted block storage on Digital Ocean. Yeah obviously it can be accessed if someone takes over the server while the storage is mounted, but if you disconnect the storage when you're not using it, I'd expect it's more of a challenge to get at it while it's offline.
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If you were truly the noob you said you were, I wouldn't recommend you to do self-hosted Nextcloud. Not until you're fully prepared and tested.
The main weakness is the unencrypted (and easily backdoorable) system that mounts it and the fact that the keys could just be read from the guests RAM while the disk is mounted.
@starbuck said
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While https://mailbox.org is neither self-hosted nor nextcloud-based as far as I can tell, it is in Europe (Germany) and starts at €1 per month - and seems to offer more calendar, docs, and storage features at higher price points. Anyway, it's free to try for 30 days so you can check it out at least to see how features compare to other possible solutions.
(Personally, I've been using FastMail for many years and would strogly recommend in general - but it is not based in Europe, and starts at $50 yearly, so ...)
You also might do well to evaluate the hosted Seafile service from Prometeus (cost starts at €24 +VAT yearly gets 200 GB storage, server is in Romania). Not sure if this does anything for email though - anyway can find some discussion on LET - and more from the proverbial horse's mouth at http://www.prometeus.net/site/iwsea.php
^ ... just some ideas to broaden range of possible solutions a bit. Depending on how much you may be willing and able to learn about system administration, your original notion (something something knit your own cheese lol) to put together something with nextcloud on a VPS seems reasonable enough - perhaps fraught with peril where email is concerned - so can augment other good suggestions in this thread with backup/alternative approaches. Good luck!
If you go down that path be careful, most shared hosts will have a policy in their ToS that prohibits you from using their server as file storage, even though softaculous can install nextCloud.
Just thought it was worth mentioning
As for security, I believe the upcoming version of nextCloud will have end to end encryption so even openvz containers will be suitable.
There's a thread around here somewhere that lists storage vps offers. I could recommend from experience: wishosting (@exception0x876), time4vps and I will get accused of shilling again but even snipped have cheap hdd ovz (usa though)
Best of luck
This occur mostly with hosts that offer "unlimited" resources and "fair use policy" for the disk space. If you go with a provider that will give you limited disk space (e.g. 20GB), then, you can use the space for whatever you want, just don't abuse other resources with heavy tasks. Nextcloud for a dozen or so clients, is fine.
Hello,
+1 with @jvnadr, ruling a server require some skills. Do not taking it straight but with the questions you're asking you should keep up using a mail service.
There are web hosting companies offering this service out there, for example we have exchange mailboxes https://www.ikoula.com/en/hosted-exchange, i also heard good things here about MXroute.
If you need storage space i'd say buy a NAS with raid, if you have a small internet connection try a hosted NAS https://www.ikoula.com/en/node/739
That's a really good point, actually. Although, I have had an experience to the contrary, it could just be the particular host I used.
My nextCloud install is hovering around 500GB used at the moment, so we're talking about different things here I suppose.
For this space, either shared hosting is way too expensive or hosted in providers that give the moon for peanuts, so, in this particular case, yes, they may not allow file hosting (but 500GB in shared hosting is like advertising "unlimited" space)!
Nextcloud is really one of the most easy things to setup on a server, especially if you intent to use it for personal / family purposes (not giving accounts to third party clients). It involves, of course, securing the server - but any server, even wordpress in shared hosting, requires measures of securing the installation.
@jackiesung @jvnadr @uptime - good points; thank you. I really am that much of a noob. Will try nextcloud slow-time and continue with gmail presently, then make my own mail server as a separate second phase of the plan.
@mksh roger, thanks - I think nextcloud is now allowing client side encryption but I'll check this before I use it as my sole provision.
@willie if you want a laugh, phrase credit to this guy's cycling blog; loved it too - he apparently had to unlink that blog entry after the lady described hunted him down and threatened him with legal action!
@Ikoula fair; unfortunately my only internet access is via my phone... and once I have a linux phone I won't need a laptop - just a usb-c cable to plug into my monitor! Unfortunately this precludes my running my own server as a safety net for my (vulnerable) phone, hence my desire to pay for a VPS.
Dear all,
Thank you so much for your thoughts on this, clearly a very slow and experimental foray into simple nextcloud use is required before going further; implementing client side encryption (due in nextcloud 13), and being aware that I can use MXroute for email if self-hosted email proves too steep a hill to climb.
I'll wait for nextcloud 13 and buy according to its system requirements. Thank you again for such encouraging comments. You're part of a fantastic asset.
Yours sincerely,
Al
@starbuck not sure you got me, on a hosted NAS (means the NAS is physicaly in a datacenter) you can easily store and share files, you can even setup a mail service if you want : https://www.synology.com/_images/tutorials/mail_system_migration/ch2_1.png
@Ikoula Aaahhhhh sorry gotcha now thank you. will consider - loving the mail service idea! Will probably try nextcloud first as excited about the video conferencing aspect (super useful for training for Viva voce exams) but if nextcloud too steep a learning curve could try NAS first
I'll echo some of the other comments here about running your own mail server - it's a total pain! From a technical perspective, it's fairly easy to install Postfix and Dovecot and get something up and running, but you'll start to lose sleep over trying to manage your IP reputation, reaching out to other mail providers to figure out why your messages are bing marked as spam, monitoring your server so you know if there are issues, and the list goes on. Been there, done it and would not recommend self-hosted email unless it's being done as part of a business.
I agree with this. Getting mail set up is a tricky thing, especially with having things marked as spam. I've found that if you have correct DNS records set up, on a clean IP and don't spam it's not too bad in most cases.
The best luck I've had is by setting up VestaCP and letting it handle the mail side of things (it also has an amazing default apache with nginx reverse proxy setup by default too which is a bonus)
Other than that, I believe @jarland offers a service I haven't yet tried and there's always the big G if you can justify the cost (not that it's huge, but this is LET afterall!)
@freerangecloud @dahartigan - thankyou both; I get the impression @jarland's service is likely to be the way forward if I want to migrate away from Google. Talking to a friend who grows his own email, it does sound like a bit of a naus, and he has multiple VMware servers running on his home computer to achieve it. Is it acceptable to run multiple virtual machines on a single VPS? Or is that a really stupid question? I would quite understand if the done thing is to purchase multiple VPS services from the same provider...
I mean it's not quite that bad, not multiple VMs kind of bad
One VM with iredmail installed is great. Problem area becomes sending, depending on need.
@jarland that's encouraging - thank you! I feel like a year of tinkering and learning while I wait for a telephone to arrive may begin to approach a workable solution...