Invoice Ninja and OpenOffice is about it for any of my several businesses. I don't need anything complex for what I do. I do construction estimation, and I used to be a farmer among other things, but I'm getting along in years to be doing all of that. So I divided up 22 acres into plots and lease to local farmers to grow silage, soy bean, and other such crops. I also have several one acre plots I lease to community groups who want to grow their own vegetables and small crops. I still keep a few livestock around for my own personal use.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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There is a reason that cloud services are popular with businesses. How does self-hosting this provide value to your customers in line with the time that you spend on IT tasks instead of your product? Do you have enough faith in your build that it will be secure and reliable? If you have downtime, does your business have flexibility to accommodate you doing IT work for hours without loss of revenue? If you go on vacation, who is on call?
I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but do consider the time investment and risks. There are alternatives to M365 and Google.
There's also risk.
Offloading this stuff to cloud means you trade $ for someone else taking the risks.
And of you're a business, you (better) have cyber insurance, and those insurance vendors will ask tough questions that most self-hosters would be clueless to answer.
It can be done, but like anything else, there's no free lunch.
And if you have a proper finance org, they'll want to see how self-hosting makes financial sense.
It takes real expertise and diligence to run everything on-prem - most small businesses don't have the luxury of that kind of diligence since the cost (staff engineering time) comes from one side of the budget, and cloud (vendor) costs reduce both your risk and come from the other side of the budget (which reduces tax liability).
https://docs.libre.space/en/stable/operation/it-infrastructure-operations.html (archive)
Most notably:
- Cloud (for some things): Nextcloud
- Forum: Discourse
- E-mail (some domains): mailu
- Conference planning: Indico
- Short URLs: YOURLS (Although I've set up Shlink at home and it's a lot better)
- Websites: Wordpress
- Status page: Cachet
- ELN: elabftw
- Inventory management: Inventree
employees and how you are managing that
We use gitlab.com in general, so we also use it for support tickets if that's what you mean 🤔
a lot of that can be done with nextcloud, there a apps that cover all sorts of thing.
I dont have a business so cant comment more
And it will glitch and break on updates etc. Next cloud requires a lot of maintenance, at least not always has for me.
I think your running it wrong if you have that many issues, but I would say Nextcloud is a big system and setup can be hard to get right.
If you need help I run nextcloud fine and could point you at things to check
I used to manually set it up in freebsd jails. Then I moved to docker. Always seems to be a disconnect between PHP and apache configs with next cloud. Every time I update it, it reaches PHP timeouts and I need to do it from cli. Every time I update it the admin dashboard bitches about insecure configs which I then correct and then it happens again the next update.
I don't know, problems with nextcloud are a near-daily thing around here. Seems like it has some structural challenges.