What i miss un articles like this is the server/hardware choice and reasoning for it. The instructions how to setup nextcloud are on the nextcloud homepage, so no reason to repeat them.
Author of the blogpost. Thank you for your feedback. The problem with hardware choice, is that many selfhosters have really low-power, budget, powersaving hardware, including myself. The point of this article was for me to discover how I could move some of my data away from Google, of which this is one piece.
I had this running on a Raspberry Pi 4 in this blogpost, which functioned just fine; although only with one user and little apps installed. I might do a follow up when I have used Nextcloud more extensively and explore different hardware options.
I switched from dropbox to nextcloud recently. I use pis for VPN gateways and DNS servers, but don't trust them for things like data storage.
I host nextcloud via TrueNAS SCALE running on a dual E5 + 4x2TB NVMe. TrueNAS handles the docker images with a kubernetes cluster managed by middleware. Straying from default settings is a time-consuming path, but the defaults work great.
Nextcloud doesn't feel perfect with lots of UI jank (initial photo upload was a real headache), but I trust the data put there will not delete itself. I love having the ability to selectively view and sync files with native OS explorers on windows, mac, and iOS. iOS photo backup with live photos is also something no other solution I've seen can compete with.
I'm also running NC on a RPi 4 (8GB), with an NFS share from my QNAP NAS as its data store. I didn't go the docker route, but rather elected to just do a local install.
I have ~12 users, ranging from a few with less than 5GB of data to a couple power users with ~100GB each.
Overall, I'm quite happy with NC. Sure, there are a couple of rough edges, but for the most part, having a single install handle file, contacts, calendar, chat, etc. has been great.
Before everyone moved to cloud services, self-hosting was a goto choice for nerds who wanted their own stuff, including me. One challenge that self-hosting has not really conquered is availability. If your rpi dies, so does your self-hosting. You might want to explore (and blog about) setting-up a failover device. I'd definitely read about that.
I am running most of my webservices of my unraid nas it runs a cheap passive cooled ASRock J3355B-ITX with 16GB RAM and 2TB SATA Cache with a 80TB JBOD array. All in a really nice compact Fractal Design Node 304. When all HDDs are running it sips 90W at standby 15W.
The nice thing about unraid is the array needs to only spin up the disks that are being accessed AND the parity disks (only while writing). I run two parity disks so that I could lose two disks in total before the array fails. While running a parity check all drives get spun up and the total noise level is arround 35db but this totally depends on the drives you are using. For me it's mostly Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530 shucked from WD Elements because of cost savings.
I had this running on a Raspberry Pi 4 in this blogpost, which functioned just fine; although only with one user and little apps installed. I might do a follow up when I have used Nextcloud more extensively and explore different hardware options.