I have recently been configuring the External storage app and I love it so far. But one thing I cannot seem to enable and configure is the smbclient. I have looked all throughout the Apps pages and although I see the backends for popular cloud storages, I cannot seem to find the backend for smbclient, which the External storage page refers to needing to enable. I have tried finding the answer within the search capabilities of this forum but have been unsuccessful. Can anyone assist? Many thanks in advance!
smbclient needs to be available on the system itself alongside the php smbclient for your server. It’s not something you can simply install as an app.
An example of manually adding it to the community docker container
apt update && apt install smbclient libsmbclient-dev -y && pecl install smbclient && docker-php-ext-enable smbclient
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smbclient is a command line tool which is ususally provided as a separate package of your Linux distribution. Once you have it installed it is accessed from within Nextcloud via a dedicated PHP module, e.g. php8-smbclient, which is also part of your distribution.
If both components are correctly installed, Nextcloud should be able to use it. You can test it by installing the Nextcloud SMB connection test app.
If you’re configuration a new external storage and select “SMB/CIFS” as external storage type the above described components are used.
Check-out the admin guide for further information:
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/external_storage/smb.html
I have my instance installed and configured through Namecheap hosting. It is part of the app suite by Softalicious so I do not deal with a command line 
If it’s on a remote hosting provider you wouldn’t even want to use SMB. It’s a protocol for file sharing through the local network. It should never be used over the internet.
What’s your use case?