Hey, so I recently had the idea of proposing some new ideas, I had for the IT infrastructure of my local scouts organisation, mainly it's own nextcloud instance and website (and if that works well, maybey a matrix server and wiki, but website and nextcloud are much higher priority right now). But, I am wondering, what the best way to do the hosting would be. Using a VPS would be pretty nice, because there would be no upfront cost, but we would have to pay monthly fee and that's pretty hard to pitch for a new and untested idea, especially because we don't have that much regular funds/income. The other option would be to self host on hardware that stays in the building, but I am not quite shure, but then we would have a pretty steep upfront cost and I am not 100 percent shure, if we even have a proper network in the building.
The main thing, I am trying to ask here is, if any of you have ever done something similar before and if so, how you did it. Also I am thankful for any advice in general. I have done this already for my family, but doing this for an entire organistation is an entirely different thing. Thank you very much in advance!
Given someone already pays for electricity and internet at the location, I'd say the cheapest option would be to ask all the members if someone has an old laptop to donate, maybe even with a broken display or whatever, main thing is it still somehow runs. Rip out the battery, Install Linux, Nextcloud (maybe Yunohost), and put it somewhere without public access. That'd be entirely for free, minus the work to set it up and maintain it.
My smaller VPS costs somewhere around 70€ a year, guess that could be worth it as well as long as it contributes something meaningful.
And be prepared to be disappointed, 99% of my scout group never used the selfhosted services I tried. I guess that's somehow okay. They were focused on the real life activities and no one had any interest to do office work or remember logins... Was always the same 2 people who did paperwork and they didn't need a cloud, so I scrapped it. Your story could be different, I'm not saying it needs to turn out that way.
Yeah, I totally get what you mean, I am kind of expecting that aswell, but at least I know, that other scouts groups in the area already have a nextcloud and it is actively beeing used, so I have some hopes in that regard. But yeah, getting them to use something like Matrix is probably pretty unrealistic.
Since it's a public instance you'd want to be sure to keep it pretty up-to-date with new system patches and the latest stable versions of Nextcloud. If you're comfortable with automating updates with ansible, k8s, docker-compose, etc. then it's not a big deal. If you're ssh'ing to a server to manually update things then it's going to be a lot of overhead and likely forgotten.
Old hardware may also bring its own issues and you'll need backups especially since old hardware (especially consumer-grade stuff) can fail very unexpectedly. And providing support for users is a whole... other thing...
I like the idea of starting with the "old laptop in a basement" approach as a way to get things going to see if the service provides benefit then look to migrate to a more stable platform in the future.
Yeah, I guess the plan would be (if we decide to use an old labtop) to have a similar backup system to my home server, so one daily incremental backup with something like borgbackup to a newly bought external hard drive and automated updates using watchtower (I heard major nextcloud upgrades can be tricky though, so I an not shure if it would be a good idea to automate those). I guess it would still suck if the laptop unexpectedly failed and we would have to scramble to find new hardware though, how long would you expect an old laptop to last as a server?