Hosting providers and Nextcloud - pls read this first

[jospoortvliet]

Hi call,

This forum section is to discuss hosting providers. A few things to note:

• Nextcloud GmbH does not do hosting. We provide software & services. So we can’t reset your password
• If you signed up through nextcloud.com/signup you signed up at a free provider. We only forwarded them your email address and have no information whatsoever - we can’t fix your account, see above.
• We also can’t guarantee quality - but that is what this forum is for. The companies part of our simple signup program commit to providing good service, and if we hear that that is not the case we could decide to remove them. So please give us feedback!
• Nextcloud hosting providers do NOT always have a commercial relation with us. That includes those in the Simple Signup program. It is a community service, not a paid one.

Picking a hosting provider or partner

Anybody and their grandma can download Nextcloud, put it on a server and ‘sell Nextcloud hosting’. For obvious reasons, the quality varies enormously. We therefore strongly recommend you pick a Nextcloud partner. They know what they are doing and, of course, have our engineers’ backing to deal with issues. Such hosting providers can be found on https://nextcloud.com/partners/

Generally, they should feature a logo like one of these:

In theory, a company that does not work with us is by our trademark guidelines not allowed to use our logo or any of our assets (videos, screenshots, text from our website etcetera). Of course, many small companies break these rules and we are unable to police that. Let us know if you see cases of this. This is doing harm to users: they think that, because the Nextcloud logo is there, they are getting services from an official partner.

Why is a partner better

Many cheap hosting providers are happy that users think they offer a reliable Nextcloud service with real support (beyond 1st level “how do I upload a file”). As long as nothing breaks, the users pay them well. If something breaks, they simply stop their ‘service’ to the user after doing an absolute minimum of support. Paraphrasing what one of them said when discussing if they should pay us for support or not:

But what do you do if you can’t fix the problems of a user?
Well, they leave, that’s no problem for us, there are many others.

Such users then come to us, asking us to fix their problems, thinking that is what they paid for. Unfortunately, they paid but got nothing, which leads to unhappy Nextcloud users. And of course, does not help us fund Nextcloud development, either.

Especially as a (small) business for which their data and up time matters, I suggest to get Nextcloud hosting from a partner. Only real partners have access to our engineers to actually fix problems. Otherwise you are paying for somebody else to Google for solutions when something breaks - something you could do yourself for a lot less money.

Feedback

We do welcome feedback on our hosting providers - very much. Especially for the simple signup program, we’d like to know if the hosting providers there are offering a decent service. If not, we can decide to remove them from the program.