Hosting category is not useful as intended

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Continuing the discussion from Partner page listing for OwnCube:

The :card_file_box: Hosting providers category has bothered me for a longtime. I don’t think it is handling the job it was intended for, because hosting partners are still separate from Nextcloud as a company…

My concern is, if anyone can resell Nextcloud,

Here is an issue asking about this from Github - Is there any way to vet providers? · Issue #51 · nextcloud/providers · GitHub

Click to read Jos' response

Yes, this is a bit of a concern. So in our Simple Signup program we try and have vetted providers, but in this list it is hard - for this reason I point to https://help.nextcloud.com/c/hosting where people can provide feedback.

Would it be good to create a topic for each provider and add a rating? Yes, yes. But we don’t get much feedback so the reputation of providers would be based on just a few votes.

Alternatively, we could do a survey once a year, and put the results in this repo - directing people to the winners. The providers would be allowed to push their users to vote, which would likely result in a fair bit of voters and thus create (more) valid results.

But that’s a lot of work to execute and I don’t really have somebody who I could dedicate this work to. Yes it is nice, but there is a lot of nice stuff we would love to do…

If you say, hey, I want to organize that - say so. That might work :wink:

  • Are any hosting providers verified by Nextcloud as legit in offering uptime, backups and reliability?
  • Is it even possible to hold these partners to some standard in regards to how they manage user data and backups?
    • If so, can we please update our documentation to only encourage these verified hosts.
  • Why recommend hosting providers over a one-click deployment on a service like Linode or Hetzner, which have known customer support and infrastructure available?
  • Why allow hosting providers to advertise on the forum, if there is no actual reason to trust them?
  • 99% of people who post to :card_file_box: Hosting providers are those who are frustrated, or someone trying to sell you their services.

These are my quick thoughts. Feel free to chime in. Do note this thread will be locked if it is not handled with respect; thanks. I’ll withhold my suggestions for how to handle this so others can chime in. :heart:

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For me there are two issues with this category:

First, it can be a bit confusing since there are also people installing themselves Nextcloud on hosting packages. But it is not the hosting category. They need support as they are often less experienced but unfortunately find themselves in a limited environment. Having a category/tag for them to share experiences on specific hosting environments would perhaps make sense.

Second, Nextcloud hosting providers (the provider runs Nextcloud) should provide support to their customers. Even if it is a problem handling the end-user devices, it is their customer, they get paid for it (and can commit bug reports, improve documentation, translation, …).
If large providers run into problems and want community support, they can help each other out on the forum. Keeping for them a specific category makes no sense.

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Also, this is probably required since hosts often limit or remove access to the underlying system. It always makes sense to go to providers directly in this case, because the forum and user cannot fix such things.

Tldr, if you did not setup nextcloud beyond your user clients on mobile, desktop or webui we cannot help you with server issues.