Hey, so I recently had the idea of proposing some new ideas, I had for the IT infrastructure of my local scouts organisation, mainly it's own nextcloud instance and website (and if that works well, maybey a matrix server and wiki, but website and nextcloud are much higher priority right now). But, I am wondering, what the best way to do the hosting would be. Using a VPS would be pretty nice, because there would be no upfront cost, but we would have to pay monthly fee and that's pretty hard to pitch for a new and untested idea, especially because we don't have that much regular funds/income. The other option would be to self host on hardware that stays in the building, but I am not quite shure, but then we would have a pretty steep upfront cost and I am not 100 percent shure, if we even have a proper network in the building.
The main thing, I am trying to ask here is, if any of you have ever done something similar before and if so, how you did it. Also I am thankful for any advice in general. I have done this already for my family, but doing this for an entire organistation is an entirely different thing. Thank you very much in advance!
Yeah, I guess the plan would be (if we decide to use an old labtop) to have a similar backup system to my home server, so one daily incremental backup with something like borgbackup to a newly bought external hard drive and automated updates using watchtower (I heard major nextcloud upgrades can be tricky though, so I an not shure if it would be a good idea to automate those). I guess it would still suck if the laptop unexpectedly failed and we would have to scramble to find new hardware though, how long would you expect an old laptop to last as a server?
Could last years? Or months? Depends on a lot of factors. Fans may not like running 24x7, memory could fail, etc.
Just be prepared for what you would do if it does.