Selfhosted

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.

The by far easiest to try would be to order one of these: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

VPS is not that much, especially if you aren't storing a ton of media. Digital Ocean and Hetzner are good places to look. This will also prevent some networking headaches you're likely to have hosting it "on prem".

If part of your reason for doing this is to involve the kids in the process, then it's better to do it locally. Someone in the org has or can find an unused desktop computer that you guys can have fun with for pretty much zero cost. You will probably have trouble trying to connect to it from outside your network though.

I wouldn't, unless you've been specifically asked by the organization to do so and given the proper authorization, legal counseling, etc, etc. Don't go looking for solutions to problems that don't exist.

Your heart is in the right place, but I'm with @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip here.

I simply wouldn’t. Just use Google Drive or Dropbox.

Unless you can provide redundancy and 24x7 support you don’t want others dependent on you.

Haven't tried it out, but there are some free Nextcloud hosts listed on the official website.

Honestly, I would go with a managed Nextcloud solution like Hetzner Storage Share or another reputable provider. No hassle of updating and securing the server, no data stored at Google or Microsoft, and easy to administrate by people who aren't expert system administrators in case you are no longer available. I also went with that route for my personal instance because it was actually cheaper than hosting it myself on a VPS.

Just a general warning:

It is one thing to provide something for family. It is another thing to be a person in authority providing one for an org. And kids are horrible and basically all have cameras everywhere they go. They WILL do something horrible and, depending on what that something is, you might now be liable for a lot of stuff you don't want to be.

You don't want that smoke. They can use google drive. Or you can talk to one of the companies that host next/own clouds for people and ask for a discount since it is the boy scouts.

Besides the time and responsibility of running the service, your biggest cost is going to be storage and maybe even transfer. None of the cheap VPS have big storage or bandwith, so I would not offer a service like this if I were you.

i'd say start small. do the the webpage on some old hardware, maybe a wiki. content consumption things that would be uncomplicated for the group to adopt. avoid things that would mean managing accounts for other people early on. a wiki or some static page using something like modocs will be easy to run off a decent internet connection at the building. low bandwith usage and low traffic.

if your goal is to degoogle group, nextcloud could be helpful for the organisers. maybe if you have success on the simple sites you can get people on board with some hardware for a small nextcloud server. but dont plan on opening the next cloud up to the kids. thats a world of risk you don't need to open up.

Hey, what's your budget? You could go far with a second-hand NUC (next unit of computing), I'm sure you can get one for under $100 and you could do more than just nextcloud with it (peertube, VPN, chat etc).

Look into digital ocean. They have pretty cheap hosting, like $6 a month last time I checked. You used to be able to get a month for free too. If it looks like a good option I can probably rustle you up a referral code.

Just a word of warning

Nextcloud is very finicky and can be prone to breakage. That's not the say don't use it but be realistic about the amount of work needed to maintain it.

Honestly I would just go for gsuite or office365 simply because they are less likely to break on you. It sucks that Nextcloud is a huge monolith but it is what we have.

I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/month, maybe even less, depending on how much heavy usage your Nextcloud instance requires. And you won‘t have to worry about keeping your hardware and network running, which pretty much always takes up more time than expected.

Some web hosters (I‘ve had very good experiences with Hetzner) charge an hourly rate and allow you to preconfigure VPSes with software like Nextcloud. So unless you have specific needs, you could just spin up an instance, check if it suits your needs and, if not, only pay a few cents.