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?
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.
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!
Personally, I think yes, it is worth it, However your friends bookkeeper might shit a brick. Building up IT infrastructure from the ground up is not cheap. Although storage cost is coming down.
Seriously, running with Google and company will be cheaper in the short term. What you can potentially gain doing it yourself however is resilience from catastrophic 3rd party events. If your not dependent on a third party for your IT infra, it doesn’t matter what they do, or don’t do. For a recent example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/influxdata-apologizes-for-deleting-cloud-regions-without-performing-scream-test/ar-AA1dIPX2
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
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?
