If you self-host all the same services you have the same exposure level if root on your hosting machine is compromised. I suppose it depends on how confident you feel in how agile you can patch if a vulnerability becomes known in postfix for example. I wouldn’t consider self hosting something that reduces your cybersecurity risk typically

I think everyone has done this. I know I have. I believe I used dmda to recover all my photos back. Unfortunately I lost all the metadata for about 3000 photos. It took years to manually retap and redate them all but at least I didn’t lose them forever

The complex part isn’t the hosting part. Its the security part, the reputation management part, the uptime part, the troubleshooting delivery part and basically every other aspect other than running postfix+dovecot

Hosting your own email is a bad idea. Hosting OTHER PEOPLE’S email is a REALLY BAD idea. Self-hosting mail on a vanity domain is a good exercise to learn how SMTP, DNS, IMAP and other protocols interact.

If you don’t like Google, Apple, or Microsoft then sign them up with Proton or another hosted provider. You don’t want to be the reason someone lost income because they missed out on a critical email from a client or their job application was blocked because it was sent from a host with poor reputation.

Cloudflare sells domains at cost. If you use apple devices and pay for iCloud+ ($1.99 a month for the cheapest plan), you can get email hosting for your domain for the entire family + a catch all address.

You can run an email host yourself but it is going to cost more in time and effort to maintain than just paying for hosting. It’s not very professional if your messages go to spam due to low reputation or if you miss a message/someone gets a bounce back because the container running your mail server was down and you didn’t realize

Run mail on a custom domain for fun, to learn what it takes, but don’t do it for mail that really matters

Apple is a hardware company first, not an advertising and services company like Google and Roku, and not a literal massive online retailer like Amazon.

Apple TV is the only one that doesn’t have ads on its home screen. I use an Apple TV to play all my physical media that has been ripped to mov and re-encoded with handbrake

I did the exact same thing 3 or so years ago. Thankfully I already had a backup but it was a bit nerve wracking to log in to next cloud and it was empty and then browsing the mount and having it also be empty

Thank you! That’s a clear and concise explanation of section 230. I’ve always heard it in reference to big social media companies but your link clearly shows the protections extend to individuals and users as well

Are individuals granted the same 230 protections as organizations when it comes to self-hosting an instance? I doubt people are forming non-profits for their self hosting endeavors

That’s part of the cost benefit equation for self hosted vs cloud hosted.

I got tired of dealing with maintenance on my VPS and on my on-prem hardware and so now I pretty much just do SaaS or run front ends that connect to public cloud backends

If you are just sending notification emails to your own account then you can use SMTP directly to O365 without authentication and it will be delivered as long as it’s being sent within your tenant (if your home IP isn’t in your SPF record it may get delivered to junk however)

This is how we handle scan to email using MFPs in our org. No credentials, or even a mailbox for the outgoing sender, required

I’ll vouch for iCloud+ too, and it does have a catch-all that you can set up

Yeah google sites is not a great platform for a blog. I chose it for aesthetic reasons and not functionality for sure

I used to self host everything but nowadays I value my time too much so I have moved my data to google drive and back it up to a local hard disk periodically. Photos go to iCloud and google photos. iCloud is running my email domain (previously was google domains/gmail)

I still do run a Plex server with my shield tv pro but that’s mostly to access my TV tuner as I stream my media from google drive directly instead.

I just got tired of taking time away from my family to troubleshoot my services or just live with downtime. I did run a $5 linode to host things for awhile but eventually it just became more cost effective to just refactor things to run natively on various cloud services. I even just redesigned my personal website/blog to run on google sites

I still love to follow the self hosted community, someday I will take my data back just not right now.

I got really long winded on this one sorry. TL;DR yes it would be easier for a big company’s IT department to handle rolling their own nextcloud but larger companies also have more obligations that make it a bit more complicated. A smaller company will need less compute and storage and manhours to manage a next cloud instance and so they can get away with it if they have a great IT person/staff

An on-premises deployment is going to take more manpower to support and maintain than a cloud deployment and an organization of 200 like OP is probably going to have 5-6 IT people who are already stretched thin.

And cloud storage is definitely a cost just like on-premises but it also comes with SLAs with guaranteed uptime and has factors of scale to be able to make delivering uptime, performance, security, and updates a lot more cost effective than rolling your own nextcloud. I’m sure it can be done in a way that is cheaper than $4000 a month or whatever 200 workspace licenses cost but not without taking a shortcut. I wouldn’t run it without a dev, prod, backup and DR server and the salary to maintain those would be just as high.

I’m making assumptions based on my experience and organization’s size and making an educated guess about his friends situation. It could be totally different and they could still have capable hardware and storage from before their cloud migration. I just know that if I was in the same position I would not want to be the one in charge of rolling the company nextcloud when down time is money lost.

I wouldn’t recommend it, a company that size is going to need to guarantee uptime and performance and they are going to need a big cap-ex purchase on servers and storage networks to get it done and get enterprise support and hire staff to maintain it.

For a smaller company that already has the infrastructure to run it, it makes a bit more sense but I wouldn’t recommend it for a small company with nothing or a large company that’s already moved to cloud.

Just one man’s opinion though, I don’t know the situation.

I am already paying for iCloud+ so I use their service with my domain. It gets the job done.

I use my domain name with iCloud+ mail. I self hosted the domain for almost a decade and it’s just easier paying for hosting. I have done it on both O365 and Gmail but they have both nerfed the ability to use custom domains so iCloud it is.