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!
Hey, what's your budget? You could go far with a second-hand NUC (next unit of computing), I'm sure you can get one for under $100 and you could do more than just nextcloud with it (peertube, VPN, chat etc).
I personally think this is a better idea than an old laptop. Easier to work on if the fan or SSD ever dies, and the cooling is a little better than any cheaper laptops I have worked on. It also wouldn't need to be a NUC, basically every PC company makes a SFF or 1L sized computer, I'm partial to the Lenovo but the Dell's are pretty nice too. I have about 8 Lenovo that are used as mini servers between home and work, on 24/7