Hardware Recommendation for 15 person team

🚧 Installation
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Hello friends,

I would like to build a nextcloud for my team of 15 people, and previously I have built my own nextcloud using my old laptop. Currently I can either turn a laptop (32GB of RAM memory, intel CORE i7-8750H processor, 1T HDD) or set up a dedicated server using raspberry or arduino bundle, I was wondering which option is best for my team (as software engineer i do not have a lot of experiences with hardware and servers but solid understanding of computers and I don’t mind get my hands dirty)? any answer would help!

Thank you all!!

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No Pi for 15 people. If this is actually important invest in a VPS or hosting service (if uptime and backups are critical).

Since you already know your needs, consider whether your team is worth a spare laptop vs something more substantial and robust.

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Must you host your Nextcloud on-prem? If not maybe you can use a Managed Nextcloud. There are a lot of hoster worldwide. With the correct package you get enough storage, backup, Talk, OnlyOffice, Collabora Online, … and the possiblity to admin the Nextcloud on your own (user, groups, apps).

For hosting at home i would rather take the laptop than the Pi. If you speak german search the Youtube channel from “Apfelcast”. He shows good hardware solutions for Nextcloud for home.

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Hi @ironmanen

You don’t necessarily have to use a VPS or a hosted Nextcloud. But you need a plan for both options. Create a catalog of requirements and then see how a service provider or yourself, if you gonna host it yourself, can meet these requirements.

The two most important points in a professional environment:

  1. uptime / availability
    How long can the Nextcloud be down in case of a hardware failure?

  2. backup:
    How many hours of work can be lost in case of a total failure or if data is accidentally deleted.

With consumer hardware there are several problems. Laptops usually have only room for one disk. If that disk fails you are a) down and b) thrown back to the state of your last backup. If the power supply fails you’re down until have a replacement, if the mainboard fails you’re down until you have found a spare part or a replacement device etc…

In a professional environment I would recommend at least two physical servers, preferably with a virtualization solution like Proxmox that can do replication, so that in case of hw failure you simply can start the VM on the second server. In addition to that you need a storage server for local backups. You also have to do cloud backups, if you can’t self-host another server at a separate location (3-2-1 backup strategy).

If you’re gonna set it up like this, you might even get away with consumer hardware. But I would still have the most important spare parts like disks, power supplys etc at stock for fast replacement. Better would be real server hardware with redundant power supplies and SSDs in a RAID array for the VM servers and spinning rust in a RAID array for the storage server.

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