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, it can definetely be a great solution, but the idea for this was specifically to be more independent from big tech. We already habdle stuff like registering for camps over Office 365, but I wanted to introduce Nextcloud to replace that, because I don't think it's a good idea to let Microsoft handle personal data of like a hundred people, that probably don't even know, that they are giving away their data to Microsoft there. But again, I don't wanna judge anyone for using things like that, Nextcloud can be a pain to maintain, especially for non technical people.
User data is typically private on business plans, at least if you stick to the core services. Plenty of companies use O365, GSuite, or whatever to facilitate this kind of thing and I'm sure they would be pitching a huge fit if their user data was being collected.
Microsoft are one of the only companies you should be trusting with your data at business levels. If they weren’t secure you’d have heard about it.