I'm looking to finally ditch Onedrive with a self hosted alternative, but I'm not sure what to go with. I want something with all of the files on a central server, with an Android client with the option to sync individual files for offline access as needed. Preferably the files should also be stored in plain format on the server to make backups easier and as a fallback if the service completely fails and I don't have time to fix it. Linux and Windows clients are a bonus but I'm happy just using a web gui if that's all that's available. These are the options I've considered so far:
Seafile - This was the one that I thought fit my needs the best until earlier but apparently it has a weird disk layout which means the files are basically inaccessible by anything else?
Nextcloud - I had originally ruled this out because I don't care about any of the additional features which people claim also slow it down and make it a bit of a resource hog, and I also don't want to deal with forced https. However I think the community image may actually be what I want as it seems to be just the file server and works with just http? I am a bit confused about the different options for the database though. https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud/
Syncthing - Not quite what I'm looking for as you need to sync the entire thing, and I don't like whatever weirdness is going on with the Android app at the moment
SAMBA share - Also not really what I'm looking for as there's no offline syncing, but very easy to set up and basically nothing to go wrong
Are there any other options I should be looking into?
Owncloud Infinite Scale was a rewrite of the codebase to get away from PHP. In theory this should be better able to run on lower end hardware. People tend to say they use it if they are only wanting the file part and not all the apps. Personally I use Nextcloud because I want the apps.
Automatic certificate renewal is built into many reverse proxies, and can be done for free, so I don't see a reason not to do it.
Nextcloud has federation of some features so I'd guess that would be a key reason you can't change the domain (you also can't change a Lemmy domain once set up). However, you're using it for file sync for yourself, right? Regardless of what you pick (even Nextcloud), you could surely just set up a new instance under the new domain then move all your files over.
Do you have any recommendations for a reverse proxy to use or resources on how to set one up? It's not something I've properly looked into yet
Check out caddy. Very straight forward syntax for a reverse proxy.
Others might have suggestions. I run everyhting in docker. I then use Traefik as the reverse proxy in docker, where you add labels to the containers you want it to handle and it works things out on it's own. I have also configured it to do certificates automatically, including automatic domain validation using a Cloudflare API.
Caddy and Nginx Proxy Manager are other popular ones that can configure HTTPS certificates for you.
You don't have to overthink it. Choose a reverse proxy you like. If it does automatic certificates, that's great. If not, Let's Encypt (which most of these services use for the free certificates) have a certbot program you install and run on a cronjob to renew certificates.