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?
Yeah, for enterprise you aren’t going to roll it out yourself. They’d use a partner company to help you set it up and configure it for their needs to ensure that it can continue to scale and provide monitoring solutions. It’s too much for one person to do that.
Where are you hosting it? Onsite? Megacorporation’s clod solution? Your cable line? What’s your data recovery plan? 200+ users can generate a lot of data. What’s the security plan? You do know how to harden every aspect of each subsystem, right? What’s the monitoring plan? Not just “is it down” but way more granular for each subsystem. How many tech and phone support people will be on call to help?
You could probably roll it out in a way that would work, but at that scale you should really be using a pro. Especially for a “friend”. Don’t want a tech problem to kill that friendship.
useful thing to remember about these systems: you fuck up and it’s a high likelihood literally nobody at the company can do any work because all their files are inaccessible
that’s like… $10000/hr in lost man hours alone, let alone reputation from not being able to respond to customers accurately, possibly missed SLAs or other contract obligations
unless your company is all about tech, it’s highly unlikely your IT team has the skills necessary to take on that level of responsibility
I once did an internship at a small (think 10 people) company that was selfhosting all their stuff. I was asked to fiddle with the services and (of course) caused a downtime of a few hours. Boy were they pissed. Now, when I think back, I can’t believe they were selfhosting that shit.
Self hosting is fine, assuming you have sane policies in place. Policies like “don’t play in prod” and “don’t let the intern touch prod.” 🤪