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.
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Did you think about just letting someone else host your apps like:
- Joplin: https://joplinapp.org/plans/
- Nextcloud: https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers
- Email: https://proton.me/mail
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)
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…
I’m just going to give you props. I have worked in Managed IT Services for a dozen years and some of the worst clients are construction, engineering and architects who use solidworks, autodesk and archicad products.
You’ve eaten humble pie and admitted that using computers as a tool, and systems design are different and though you might understand a lot, just like I can build a 3d model, the devil is in the detail.
Building robust solutions that meet your business continuity plans, disaster recovery plans, secure your data for cyber risk and to meet ISO and yet are still somehow usable in a workflow for end users is not something you just pick up as a hobby and implement.
The way I handle technology Lifecycle is in 5 steps: strategy, plan, implement, support, maintain. Each part has distinct requirements and considerations. It’s all well and good to implement something but you need to get support when it goes wrong or misbehaves. You need to monitor and report for backups, patching, system alerts. Lots of people might do the implement, but consider the Lifecycle of the solution.
People do these things at home but they’re home labbing, they’re labs. Production requires more.
Anyway a bunch of people closer to your part of the world will probably help you out here.
I just want to again recognise and compliment you on realising and openly saying you want help rather than just do the usual “oh I know best” that I hear over and over usually just before someone gets ransomed on their never patched log4j using openssl heartbleed publicly exposed server infrastructure.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT Git Popular version control system, primarily for code IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation Plex Brand of media server package SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.
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The problem is you’d need someone to do maintenance and updates too, because stuff can/does break and if you didn’t set it up, you won’t know how to fix it.
You can sign up with a Nextcloud hosting provider for access to files, notes, photo management, calendar, contacts, etc…
For email I recommend a solid provider like mailbox.org or skiff.com
For video streaming with Plex and the supporting *arrs you can install all of those on windows AFAIK, so you can probably do those yourself with minimal effort on learning new things.
Wow, thanks for the mailbox.org recommendation. Looks like an easy and reasonably priced way to move away from Google for email and calendar.
I have spent […] thousands of hours trying to setup various different services on various different platforms
I don’t believe you. If you spend that much time on something you get good at it.
Hello I have also literally spent thousands of hours on the general topic of self hosting and related stuff such as linux, filesystems, networking, hardware, software etc etc. Yes, it is possible to be this stupid.
Here is my simple math:
2000 hours / 12 hour days = 167 days. I have been generally building up on this subject for about 10 years. And in COVID I had a lot of blocks of days where I was just at the computer. For more than 12 hours. I think I have easily spent more than 2000 hours.
I still have extremely rickety set up that mostly isn’t doing any of the things I want. It’s fine for me because I have learned a lot, have fun, and nothing is mission critical. If I had money/business that was reliant on this I would absolutely pay someone! That is just part of doing business. Especially if anyone else was at all reliant upon it. If I have employees or the work I do is important than it is only respectful and professional to swallow the costs to ensure it is done at quality. And even if its just for my own use, not everyone enjoys this stuff and still want to be free of google etc.
Everyone here reminds me of all the shitty landlords who do such a bad job of “fixing” things themselves instead of paying the going rate for a trade to come do it right and to code. Like 3 visits to install an interior doorknob and never getting it right. Like dude, just admit you aren’t any good at installing doorknobs. And please don’t go near the plumbing.
