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Comment by boramalper | Hacker News Reader

I started using Nextcloud first to have an alternative to big-tech in case Google locks me out of my account, and then it became my daily driver. It's fast, private, and has mature clients for all major desktop and mobile platforms. Together with OnlyOffice, it's a good-enough substitute for Google Docs Editors (the office suite) for non-collaborative editing.

I love self-hosting but file storage is one thing that I don't want to risk. I've been paying for Hetzner Storage Share [0] happily to save myself the headache.

If you want a different hosting provider, Nextcloud now has Simple Signup program[1] which helps new users to sign up for a free plan with a provider near them, offering ≥ 2GB of storage. You can also browse the entire list if you want to pick one manually.[2]

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/

[1] https://nextcloud.com/sign-up/

[2] https://nextcloud.com/providers/#:~:text=Providers%20for%20h...

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The desktop clients are anything but “mature”, and the whole point of GDocs is collaborative editing. If you don’t want to collaborate, syncthing works fine and doesn’t need a server.

> the whole point of GDocs is collaborative editing

Strong disagree. Collaborative editing is one of the major points but not the only one. For me and I believe many others, being able to view and edit my documents in a web browser is a huge convenience.

(Speaking of collaborative editing, OnlyOffice too supports it. [0] However, you might need to setup a standalone “document server” [1] if you’ve a lot of collaborators.)

[0] https://helpcenter.onlyoffice.com/onlyoffice-editors/onlyoff...

[1] https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-share/faq/addition...

I supported a NextCloud + OnlyOffice server for 4 years for a 100-person company, and have since moved to Collabora Code (which has been running for ~2 years now). IME Code has better performance, is easier to upgrade, provides better compatibility with MS Office (since it's basically LibreOffice with a web UI), and is easier to integrate with (I wrote some integrations for a couple of internal systems and it's been a breeze).

It's fully FOSS. https://www.collaboraonline.com/code

Good to know. I’ve been sticking with OnlyOffice only because it’s supported out of the box on Hetzner [0] (as in, I don’t need to setup and maintain any “document server”). Surprisingly, this is what they say about Collabora:

> Due to performance reasons, we cannot support the built-in version of Collabora. So if you still want to use Collabora, you will need to provide your own server. You could use, for example, one of our unmanaged dedicated root servers or a Hetzner Cloud server. You can activate Collabora via the App Store, but you will need to use the other server for data processing. You as the customer are responsible for configuring this server yourself in the app's settings.

[0] https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-share/faq/addition...

If you start on a free plan but then ultimately switch to another provider do you have any idea of how hard it would be to export and import all your tasks, files, etc?

Files are files so you can download them to your computer and upload them to the new provider. Unfortunately I am not aware of any direct provider-to-provider sync.

Application data depends on the app. For example, Notes [0] save your notes as Markdown files so you can move them (along with your files) wherever you want. However, News [1] don't and don't have export/import features at the moment either [2].

Nextcloud as a file storage solution and a non-collaborative office suite is great, but I cannot recommend its apps the same way. They are very convenient to install, but the quality varies a lot in my opinion so evaluate before you adopt.

[0] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/notes

[1] https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news

[2] https://github.com/nextcloud/news/issues/2503#issuecomment-2...

You can share folders between nextcloud instances and copy from one to another. No download needed.

TIL, thank you!

I have moved twice now. First from my raspberry pi to cloud and the second time between cloud providers. There might be other ways but you can share folders between Nextcloud instances. I have shared my whole nextcloud from the old one to a folder in the new one. Then in the new instance you copy folders from the shared drive to your new instance. For ~300-400 GB in takes a moment and I do some spot checks, but after half a day it's done. And you don't actually do things, you just wait that a folder copy finishes, check and then start the new one. There might be more automated ways, but this worked for me.

> I've been paying for Hetzner Storage Share [0] happily to save myself the headache.

Assuming you start with NX11, which has 1TB storage, and before hitting the limit you want to upgrade to the 5TB storage, NX21.

Can you just call Hetzner and tell them they should upgrade your NX11 plan to NX21 in-place, or will you have to order NX21 and then move all the data over to the new instance yourself?

Pretty sure you can do an in-place upgrade on the web interface of Hetzner

In place, you don't need to move data yourself to a new instance. You just choose the bigger plan in their web portal.

To answer my own question:

  Scalability
  Stay flexible with your Storage Share. Regardless of how your requirements change over time, you can upgrade or downgrade your Storage Share in a few quick steps and without worrying about data loss. Simply switch between the Storage Share package size you need by going to your account on the konsoleH, and then to "Account type".

It's nice to see that they also offer the ability to downgrade.

How did you solve the fact that Hetzner's instances do not have Elasticsearch set up for full-text search?

I'm also having that problem right now, my solution so far is to host an elasticsearch server somewhere else (at home on an old laptop via a tuns.sh ssh tunnel)

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