I started self-hosting a bit prior to when Docker took off, and getting multiple services running was much harder. Service A wants a certain version of PHP installed with certain plugins while Service B wants a different version. You’d follow a tutorial for installing Service C and desperately hope that it wouldn’t somehow break Service A or B. You installed Service D for a bit despite all the installation pain and now want to uninstall it - I hope you tracked exactly what config changes you made throughout the system so you can undo it.

Docker fixed all of this by making each service independent through containers which made self-hosting 10x easier. I’d also add that I love how easy it is to transfer my setup to a new server - I keep all of my container volumes in a specific directory and my docker-compose files in another and that’s all I need to backup / transfer. Without Docker you’d have to specifically handle each & every configuration file and database location, and if you later upgrade to a newer version of the OS or a different distro you’d have to handle possible conflicts between your versions and what the distro expects.

FYI I’ve had a really good experience with using Headscale for a true open-source Tailscale experience. It helps that the Tailscale clients work with it too and that Tailscale (very unofficially) help support it.

I think you should take baby-steps and focus first on just getting something running for you to use. Maybe first experiment with configuring an application you’d like in a virtual machine before you spend money on hardware too.

I have a Wireguard network setup for my devices that routes through my somewhat distant server. I find when I have both it and Tailscale open, Tailscale tries routing through Wireguard even though both devices might be on the same LAN. Unfortunately I don’t believe Tailscale has a way to forbid it from routing over other VPNs or networks.

I can’t speak for those two services in particular, but I know that Matrix will check https://domain.com/.well-known/matrix/server to see what (sub)domain is responsible for domain.com. I suspect other services also use .well-known too.

And none the container names or link aliases conflict? Like you don’t have multiple db containers? Perhaps try renaming the Nextcloud db to something like nextcloud_db if you aren’t already.

No, because these licenses can’t bind the copyright owner themselvess. AGPL is the terms that OwnCloud allows us access to it, but as it’s their code they don’t need a license to do whatever with it.

Let me put it another way - OwnCloud would be the only folks with standing to sue someone for violating the AGPL on their code. That means that the only people who could possibly sue OwnCloud for having a non-AGPL version is… OwnCloud. So even if the AGPL somehow claimed to bind the copyright owner it still wouldn’t work legally as the copyright owner just has to not sue themselves.

Most of the items on that list (with the possible exception of the ‘Enterprise Apps’) are items that involve them either hosting an aspect for you (push notifications), training, or utilizing their OAuth credentials with Microsoft. Because they forked OwnCloud they’re actually bound by the AGPL on that original code and legally can’t license features in the main codebase as anything other than AGPL (less sure on those ‘apps’), so they’re limited in what features they can restrict to paying customers.

This is a good summary, but the Tl;DR is that Owncloud has a non-open source Enterprise version with extra features you need to pay for, while Nextcloud is a fully open source fork.

What name do you assign the DB for PostgreSQL in Docker and does it by chance happen to match the name of any other containers, possibly in other docker compose files?

I’m only mentioning it because I experienced weird inconsistent issues with a service I was running where it was sometimes having trouble connecting to its DB companion and I eventually realized that it was sometimes connecting to the other container. I was also finding that turning it off and on again was often ‘fixing’ the issue, at least for a while. Might be worth checking out. I’d also consider viewing the logs for Nextcloud (docker logs -f ) when you’re unable to login and see if there are any errors. Frankly I’ve never had these specific issues with Nextcloud, and given that it’s based on PHP (it only ‘executes’ on an HTTP request), it seems like restarting shouldn’t help unless it’s something else.

Sigh… not an ISP, but the service I rent my server from only provides me with a /128. Yes that’s right, exactly one IPV6 address and not one more.

I also self-host WikiJS and am quite happy with it. FYI though if you’re setting it up I’d instead configure it to use Postgres as the database, as I recall reading that they’re planning on removing SQLite support at some point. Unfortunately though that does mean you lose a one-liner like this.