[stego-tech]

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]

There are plenty of companies that will host Nextcloud for you if you don't want to handle it yourself.

[stego-tech]

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.

[ensignavenger]

I'm not sure what you mean by "nonstandard". Next loud implements standards like webdav, carddav, caldav, email (smtp, etc) and others.

Your staff may be familiar with Office365, Google Workspaces, Nextcloud, or any number of solutions, or none at all. So you will still have to leovide some level of training and support.

Not being locked in provides startups with ghe flexability they need, and the standards Nextcloud implements makes it even more flexible.

[stego-tech]

You're right, and I should clarify: non-standard from the perspective of an AMER Enterprise IT Engineer, and specifically from a talent acquisition perspective. I don't doubt you could train staff in NextCloud's offerings, but again, the point I was making is that it's probably not the best solution for a startup if you want to make sure time is spent solving the challenges of your product, rather than the challenges of the underlying corporate kit you've chosen to adopt.

As for locked-in..._eh_, that's both fair (Google and Microsoft both have abysmal data exfil capabilities) but not as valid as it used to be (there are gobs of startups whose entire schtick is automating your exit strategy from a "locked-in" vendor). By the time vendor lock-in for your corporate IT is a concern, you've likely got the capital to splash on an actual, dedicated Enterprise IT team.

[rickydroll]

> All of this costs time, which startups don't necessarily...

Remember that it is easier to unwind a startup if you only need to turn off cloud services instead of disposing of equipment and support contracts.

[Brian_K_White]

https://ziglang.org/news/migrate-to-self-hosting/

[stego-tech]

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]

This