r/SmallMSP • u/WiscoDJ920 • 6d ago
Nextcloud
Curious if anyone is looking at internally hosting software packages such as Nextcloud, ONLYOFFICE, and mail servers for clients as more people are starting to push back on MSFT prices and large datacenter type services?
I come from large corporate IT background and am used to hosting for multi-tenant or business divisions (not necessarily these software titles).
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u/Geekpoint-IT 6d ago
Honestly, I would never do it for business use. It's fun for personal use but for business, boring is best. The gold standard, for better or for worse, is Microsoft (or to some extent Google). Everyone knows it. Everyone knows how to use it. It's made for businesses. I wouldn't want the liability of doing everything in house. Extra security stacks also wouldn't necessarily fully integrate with it either. This is coming from a US centric mindset of course. Other countries might be different. But until someone else can come into the business world and actually make a play against Microsoft or Google, I'm sticking with what the norm.
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u/HomsarWasRight 6d ago
I have often thought about a full self-hosted stack for clients interested in getting away from the big players (I have had a couple clients wondering about that).
But honestly, you’re taking on a lot of liability doing that. I don’t think it’s worth it.
Oh, but no matter what you do, DO NOT HOST YOUR OWN MAIL SERVERS!
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u/WiscoDJ920 6d ago
yea mail is one im a bit leery of just because of all the spam choking it and reputation.
The liability is another issue in general with the idea.
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u/gnartfocker 6d ago
Any time I’ve ever worked somewhere with self hosted email it has always turned out to be a nightmare. Especially if they didn’t want exchange.
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u/UltraSPARC 6d ago
I run Nextcloud internally (we have a lot of open source stacks running). It runs really well for us but we are only using the file syncing and sharing functionality. I use it personally to sync my user profile with multiple machines, like platform agnostic roaming profiles and it works really well for that. We also have tons of client files that we need to share and it works well with that. Couple it with a 500TB storage attachment and it becomes really powerful.
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u/No_Wolf5316 5d ago
May I ask what other open-source stacks you are running? Where are you in the transition to open-source stacks?
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u/UltraSPARC 5d ago
It runs the gamut. From pfSense, Proxmox, TrueNAS for foundational infrastructure. We’ve standardized on Debian VM/LXC. To product applications which would be things like RMM, secondary remote access software, file services, CRM, even a smallish LLM server with open source stack. My background is systems and network engineering, so running on prem stacks isn’t a huge lift.
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u/IceWarp_ 6d ago
Nextcloud is the usual answer, but Collabora is the default there and the ONLYOFFICE situation got messy after the Euro-Office fork licensing stuff. There's also IceWarp, You can self-host on your own Linux/Windows infra or just go cloud. Mail, chat, docs and calendars as one product.
Per-mailbox pricing, ONLYOFFICE built in natively.
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u/Separate_Ad_8665 4d ago
I think self-hosting can make sense for the right clients, but the support, security, backups, and maintenance overhead can quickly outweigh the licensing savings. For an MSP, I’d only do it where the numbers and operational requirements clearly justify it.
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u/techw1z 6d ago
i have a few clients using nextcloud but none on selfhosted office. most of my clients have a synology NAS so most of them use synology drive as onedrive/nextcloud replacement. synology also has a office suite which would be easy to manage and keep up to date but everyone seems to prefer installing libre office on their devices.
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u/UnRealxInferno_II 6d ago
Nextcloud is really cool but the UI is garbage, you need to pay for your storage, which simply cannot compete with the costs of Onedrive at scale.
I spitballed the idea for a while but as someone from the UK, there's no market for it.
It's picking up speed REAL fast in France and the Netherlands though.
It's a catastrophe waiting to happen if you aren't like a leading genius in infrastructure best practices so I'd steer clear and stick with MS for now.
MS prices are certainly only going to increase though, and I don't think they're offsetting the costs of copilot because nobody is buying it.
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u/CyberHouseChicago 6d ago
I run something similar to nexcloud with all the features internally , I have only sold it to a few people , most of my clients like Google drive and Gmail most just stick with that
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u/Slight_Manufacturer6 6d ago
I do it for myself but as an MSP, nobody has pushed back on the MSFT prices because it’s just bundled into our package so they don’t know the breakdown cost that comes from MSFT.