Cpanel hosted vs AIO

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1

Hello Community.
I am not very expert in NC and need to knwo few thing. I have Nextcloud server V28 working fine, i am unable to install TURN server on same as it ALMALINUX Cpanel server.

over all im satsified with it, I just want to know if there any big difference in AIO on stand alone server?

here is similar question by someone but was never really answered.Nextcloud Deployment: AIO-VM vs Nextcloud-VM |RancherVM | Reverse-Proxy and VM

I read many posts about AIO but still need some assistance. I have nextcloud installed via Cpanel server (2 vCPU , 8GB server, only for nextcloud)

My Main concerns are

1- Is there any DIfference in AIO docker and Nextcloud server installed via Cpanel?
2- Does AIO includes Turn server?
3- What extra things are included in AIO?
4- any Advantage or Ddisadvantage of AIO over Nextcloud installed via cpanel server?
5- which one is easy to manage like backups, updates, migration etc

2

Cpanel is shared hosting, which has a set number of programs and only the functionality you are allowed to use from your host’s slice. It will inherently always be less flexible than probably any other way to install Nextcloud. It is also cheap.

You run into trouble if your cpanel host does not add support for a PHP version, skips modules or doesn’t want to support something Nextcloud adjacent, such as the Turn server. They could also drop their support of Nextcloud itself at any time, in addition to database and webhost limitations.

If you need more flexibility, use docker like AIO on an actual machine, dedicated server, or VPS and do whatever you want.

Going to close this since cpanel is a limited experience, which is limited by your hosting provider. You will only ever be able to do what they let you, but in the end it is shared resources they likely oversell more for hosting static websites than serving Nextcloud for multiple machines… at that point you’ll be exhausting cpanel resources for someone else. :person_shrugging:

Good luck, whether you stay with cpanel or learn more about Linux, Docker, and Nextcloud with something like AIO.

5

Re-opened, but there is not much more similarity to discuss between Cpanel and an actual server or VPS or machine to run Nextcloud on.

Nextcloud will always be less capable because of the limitations imposed by whoever runs Cpanel. Good luck with this.

Listed in above post. Re-iterarted below as well. Hope it helps.

Yes, see their documentation

A full list is on the project readme. See the documentation for a comprehensive list. Bundling things within Docker is the concept behind AIO, so you can choose what things you wish to use as part of running docker.

Here is a copypaste from the readme. Click to expand for full list

Included are:

  • Nextcloud
  • Nextcloud Office
  • High performance backend for Nextcloud Files
  • High performance backend for Nextcloud Talk and TURN-server
  • Nextcloud Talk Recording-server
  • Backup solution (based on BorgBackup)
  • Imaginary (for previews of heic, heif, illustrator, pdf, svg, tiff and webp)
  • ClamAV (Antivirus backend for Nextcloud)
  • Fulltextsearch

And much more:

  • Simple web interface included that enables easy installation and maintenance
  • Easy updates included
  • Update and backup notifications included
  • Daily backups can get enabled from the AIO interface which also allows to update all containers, Nextcloud and its apps afterwards automatically
  • Instance restore from backup archive via the AIO interface included (you only need the archive and the password in order to restore the whole instance on a new AIO instance)
  • APCu as local cache
  • Redis as distributed cache and for file locking
  • Postgresql as database
  • PHP-FPM with performance-optimized config (e.g. Opcache and JIT enabled by default)
  • A+ security in Nextcloud security scan
  • Ready to be used behind existing Reverse proxies
  • Can be used behind Cloudflare Tunnel
  • Ready for big file uploads up to 10 GB on public links, adjustable (logged in users can upload much bigger files using the webinterface or the mobile/desktop clients since chunking is used in that case)
  • PHP and web server timeouts set to 3600s, adjustable (important for big file uploads)
  • Defaults to a max of 512 MB RAM per PHP process, adjustable
  • Automatic TLS included (by using Let’s Encrypt)
  • Brotli compression enabled by default for javascript, css and svg files which reduces Nextcloud load times
  • HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 enabled
  • “Pretty URLs” for Nextcloud are enabled by default (removes the index.php from all links)
  • Video previews work out of the box and when Imaginary is enabled, many recent image formats as well!
  • Only one domain and not multiple domains are required for everything to work (usually you would need to have one domain for each service which is much more complex)
  • Adjustable location of Nextcloud’s datadir (e.g. good for easy file-sharing with host system on Windows and MacOS)
  • By default confined (good for security) but can allow access to additional storages in order to enable the usage of the local external storage feature
  • Possibility included to adjust default installed Nextcloud apps
  • Nextcloud installation is not read only - that means you can apply patches if you should need them (instead of having to wait for the next release for them getting applied)
  • ffmpeg, smbclient and nodejs are included by default
  • Possibility included to permanently add additional OS packages into the Nextcloud container without having to build your own Docker image
  • Possibility included to permanently add additional PHP extensions into the Nextcloud container without having to build your own Docker image
  • Possibility included to pass the needed device for hardware transcoding to the Nextcloud container
  • Possibility included to store all docker related files on a separate drive
  • Additional features can be added very easily
  • LDAP can be used as user backend for Nextcloud
  • Migration from any former Nextcloud installation to AIO is possible. See this documentation
  • Fail2Ban can be added
  • phpMyAdmin, Adminer or pgAdmin can be added
  • Mail server can be added
  • Nextcloud can be accessed locally via the domain
  • Can be installed locally (if you don’t want or cannot make the instance publicly reachable)
  • IPv6-ready
  • Can be used with Docker rootless (good for additional security)
  • Runs on all platforms Docker supports (e.g. also on Windows and Macos)
  • Included containers easy to debug by having the possibility to check their logs directly from the AIO interface
  • Docker-compose ready
  • Can be installed without a container having access to the docker socket
  • Can be installed with Docker Swarm
  • Can be installed with Kubernetes
  • Almost all included containers Alpine Linux based (good for security and size)
  • Many of the included containers run as non-root user (good for security)
  • Many of the included containers have a read-only root-FS (good for security)
  • Included containers run in its own docker network (good for security) and only really necessary ports are exposed on the host
  • Multiple instances on one server are doable without having to deal with VMs
  • Adjustable backup path from the AIO interface (good to put the backups e.g. on a different drive)
  • Possibility included to also back up external Docker Volumes or Host paths (can be used for host backups)
  • Borg backup can be completely managed from the AIO interface, including backup creation, backup restore, backup integrity check and integrity-repair
  • Remote backups are indirectly possible
  • Updates and backups can be run from an external script. See this documentation for a complete example.
  • Shared hosting on Cpanel = performance issues
  • Cpanel is always subject to change. In my case the host removed Nextcloud entirely without warning
    • You may find PHP is not updated in accordance with Nextcloud, which could leave you waiting until the host takes action
    • You may find PHP modules missing, impacting performance
    • You may find MariaDB/MySQL issues (same as PHP) pending the host taking action
    • 2 shared vCPU cores is not much for running production Nextcloud

None of these disadvantages apply to AIO. You simply install it on any machine of your choice with Docker and configure however you wish.

  • This also means you can install additional services, such as a TURN server without question.
  • or other services such as the Office suite
  • You’ll be able to dedicate hardware and not need to share your resources with other users
  • You have full control over the underlying infrastructure and will not need to request assistance from a third party.

Hope this answers all your questions.

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6

thankyou for your support and time, just to clarify, i have my own Cpanel server with dedicated resources for nextcloud, only reason i was using cpanel was easy customization in config, htaccess and other files.

however as its not possible to install TURN server on Cpanel server, i was looking for alternate. after your answer, i will try AIO docker.

Thankyou

1 Like
7

If you have your own dedicated server, you can probably install TURN server as well. How cPanel helps in running Nextcloud, I have doubts about that, if you don’t need it for anything else, it is probably easier to run in directly.

AIO compared to that helps you a bit as it configures a lot of things. In your place, I’d continue using my current server, and I would locally try to use a virtual machine with Linux and try to install AIO. Don’t expect immediately that everything works, take some time. If you feel comfortable with it, you can replace your current setup with it.

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