I would very much like to move from Google and Microsoft and other proprietary, non privacy services.
I have spent hundreds of $ and thousands of hours trying to setup various different services on various different platforms and every single one of them has been difficult, annoying, frustrating, and ultimately fails.
I have concluded I am just not the guy to do this as I am Windows CAD guy and have no idea what I am doing with networking, Linux or CLI. 90% of the words and terms in tutorials are greek to me.
I am looking for notes (Joplin), Google Drive replacement (NextCloud?), and email (??) on a cloud server. And then video streaming (plex or jellyfin + *arr?) and photo management (immich?) on my local machines.
Let me know if you are interested or know of somewhere better to post this.
Did you think about just letting someone else host your apps like:
Or generic providers like https://yunohost.org/ which have one click solutions for many different software.
It’s still baffling for me that none of their “budget-cloud” (Hetzner, OVH) providers have not gotten into this segment of taking open source packages and offer as a turn-key system.
It exists, but it’s generally really small shops that I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending.
The bigger hosting providers are fine with the status quo, because it means their support tickets are from people who at least know something about anything rather than complete noobies who need help resetting their password (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just higher volume and not what hetzner staff is trained on)
They could solve your last point by providing a community forum like Discourse or even Lemmy, and saying that support for the packaged software is an extra charge.
Hetzner has Nextcloud in their your-storageshare.de offer. It’s a hosted instance which you are admin of. About 5 Euros a month for 1 TB of storage for the smallest tier. This was the way I chose after years of self hosting. Your-storageshare is awesome and I don’t get tired of recommending it. Maybe I should ask for a commission at some point…
it’s a hell of a lot more work and liability than just renting the server space and letting the user do ‘whatever’ with it.
Netcup offers it with their groupware. I assume it’s just a mail cow stack.
I’ll look into some of those links you sent, thank you.
I did try linode which advertised one click setup for some of these apps. But it still required dancing just the right dance just the right way and SSH’ing into a linux computer to initialize everything. Once initialized only one of my computers can sync with it, my phone and other computers say invalid connection. After troubleshooting for several days I tore it down and built it back up and now none of my devices can connect.
I do have Proton and that was painless to setup, but when I share files using a public link other people only get a blank screen. They have basically nothing for photos.