I selfhosted my Nextcloud and really enjoyed it for personal use. One of my friends took a look into it and thought that it could be a good thing for his company that employees +200 people and growing… They are currently using Google Workspace but want to ditch it completely in favor of something that they can control themselves. So here’s my question, is it worth to use NextCloud on a company of this size, is there a better alternative? Or should they just keep using Megacorporation’s cloud solutions? If it is worth it, how much should I charge them for hosting it and doing the implementation and support?
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My biggest issue with Nextcloud is there is no LTS version. Employees do NOT like things constantly changing, and Nextcloud has some pretty major changes every 4-6 months. As an admin you really have to keep up to date, or you run into trouble, not just with security, but with trying to upgrade later, as you can’t upgrade across major versions.
In my opinion, a 2-3 year supported LTS version would make Nextcloud way more attractive to hosting in stable environments.
Do not expect you can offer this service for a competive price against cloud prices. Caring for a company IT system is a big challenge and requires more work the more users there are.
For a company this size: make a clear contract. Consider how much time you need for setup/installation, monthly hours for maintenance, monitoring and at least daily(!) backups. Let them choose if they want it with a failover and charge for the required hours and material. Also put in the contract when they can expect support from you, including a clause for a holiday substitute admin (if needed). Then put a pricetag on support hours for holding people’s hands when they “can’t find that file they uploaded a week ago and it is surely a server issue” and put a pricetag on engineering hours for any modifications they might want, like installing any plugins they deem useful for themselves. Hardware prices, traffic, rack space and power should be included as well. Have a good plan for updates, choose your distro wisely, do not rely on autoupdates.
Play all this through in your head, add up the hours, choose a fair rate and then you have your pricetag.
Cloud will always be cheaper, because they have their infrastructure already deployed. Building from the ground up is more expensive, but I think it is worth it. Will they?
It is worth it. How much you charge is up to you. A good start would be to use the pricing on Nextcloud’s site as a gauge, seeing as you will be doing more than just the application. You will do the servers, VMs etc. as well. If your friend is at all worried about privacy, then get their company onto Nextcloud. That is my 2c. GL!
We use nextcloud where I work, it is a smaller company (less than 100 people) but it works just fine.
I think the key question is to ask what about Googles solution is driving them to look elsewhere. Once that’s known it’s possible to work out if NextCloud deployed in house or via a partner is the right way forward, or if another cloud offering might be more suitable.
Yes, with some big "if"s. NextCloud can work very well for a large organization if that large organization has a “real” IT department. I use “real” to describe how IT departments used to work 20+ years ago, where someone from IT was expected to be on call 24/7, they built and configured their own software, did daily checks and maintenance, etc. Those sorts of IT departments are rare these days. But if they have the right personnel, it can definitely be done. NextCloud can be set up with hot failovers and fancy stuff like that if you know what you’re doing.
I think the reason they are rare is because companies are not willing to pay for that sort of IT department.
For an enterprise I would suggest working with a nextcloud partner. Unless they have a sizeable internal IT team of course.
Unless the data you hold is so sensitive that it cannot be stored in the cloud, I think a cloud approach is the way to go. That way you get predictable costs and reliable uptime
Yeah, for enterprise you aren’t going to roll it out yourself. They’d use a partner company to help you set it up and configure it for their needs to ensure that it can continue to scale and provide monitoring solutions. It’s too much for one person to do that.
Where are you hosting it? Onsite? Megacorporation’s clod solution? Your cable line? What’s your data recovery plan? 200+ users can generate a lot of data. What’s the security plan? You do know how to harden every aspect of each subsystem, right? What’s the monitoring plan? Not just “is it down” but way more granular for each subsystem. How many tech and phone support people will be on call to help?
You could probably roll it out in a way that would work, but at that scale you should really be using a pro. Especially for a “friend”. Don’t want a tech problem to kill that friendship.
useful thing to remember about these systems: you fuck up and it’s a high likelihood literally nobody at the company can do any work because all their files are inaccessible
that’s like… $10000/hr in lost man hours alone, let alone reputation from not being able to respond to customers accurately, possibly missed SLAs or other contract obligations
unless your company is all about tech, it’s highly unlikely your IT team has the skills necessary to take on that level of responsibility
I once did an internship at a small (think 10 people) company that was selfhosting all their stuff. I was asked to fiddle with the services and (of course) caused a downtime of a few hours. Boy were they pissed. Now, when I think back, I can’t believe they were selfhosting that shit.
Self hosting is fine, assuming you have sane policies in place. Policies like “don’t play in prod” and “don’t let the intern touch prod.” 🤪
