hi!
Iâve been migrating my cloud storage from Google Workspace to Hetznerâs shared storage Nextcloud.
Iâve managed to connect my storage plan to my domain (provided by Google Domains), so that I can access my dashboard via my own URL, thatâs great! but this is as far as my knowledge go in DNS configurations stuff so Iâd appreciate your support!
I would like to link my email address to this Nextcloud account (and have it hosted on my Hetzner sotrage), so I could use it through Nextcloudâs email client.
itâs just important to me that the email address remains the same through this migration.
currently, it seems to have Hetznerâs default email configuration.
since I anticipated my email address downtime as the migration is ongoing, Iâce used a temporary Gmail email address for my account registration. when I enabled Nextcloudâs email client, it suggests to connect to this temporary address:
It seems like there might be a misunderstanding about Nextcloudâs capabilities regarding email hosting. Nextcloud itself doesnât function as an email server; rather, itâs primarily designed for file storage and collaboration.
To host your email address and use it through Nextcloudâs email client, youâll need to set up email hosting separately. Hetzner doesnât offer managed mail servers, so you might want to explore other providers like Mailbox.org, Posteo, or Tutanota for this purpose. (Some dont support custom Domains but mailbox.org certainly does).
The email server configuration you see in Nextcloudâs admin settings is meant for sending emails to users of the Nextcloud instance from ânx...@your-storageshare.deâ, not for hosting email accounts.
Additionally, itâs important to clarify that the Mail app in Nextcloud is designed to access a mail server as a client, rather than hosting a mail server itself. So, even if you configure it correctly, it wonât host your email.
Tldr; nextcloud is Not a Mail Server only a Client.
Use a mail provider Point you DNS to that Provider.
I hope this helps clarify things for you. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask!
yes thank you. I figured that out and initially opted for one Hetznersâ webhosting plans which also came with a mail server. earlier this week Iâve terminated it all because I got a little frustrated with how limitated it all was, being trapped in separate containers which sit in separate accounts and have separate plans.
Iâve decided to undertake hosting my storage and mail server, despite having practically 0 experience running servers. though Iâve been reading and learning a lot about it so Iâd appreciate any advice on the matter if you have any.
Iâd get a storage VPS at Contabo running Ubuntu. Iâve opted out of Hetzner, anything to do with Hetzner tbf because the customer service and generally the management tools were not to my likingâŠ
Iâve already practiced installing Nextcloud on an Ubuntu server on a VM. itâs all pretty straightforward I must say! I havenât got around to figuring out the mail server thing though. have you got a mail server software for Ubuntu in mind, thatâs relatively easy for beginners and sufficient docs to learn from?
Iâd also appreciate an advice on how to keep a server clean. Iâm so far quite used to anything having a GUI but even if Iâd install something manually, Iâd put it in a containing folder. whatâs the equivalent of that in a server? how do you typically contain databases of different programmes that youâre running (meaning: software 1-Nextcloud, software 2-mail)?
My go-to guide for securing a server is Beginners Guide to Securing a Linux Server â Riyad Kalla. I would really, really discoruage you from hosting your own mail-server. It is a huge amount of effort and maintenance to secure it, keep up with all the spam protection measures, have it accepted by other mail servers and keep it of email-ban-lists. Here is a post that sums up my feelings on that matter pretty well.
I went pretty much the opposite route. I hosted my nextcloud instance at contabo with my mails being hosted by mailbox.org (german). My personal experience with contabo was really bad. One day they just accedentally deleted my server with all my files. Since then i switched to Hetzner with a VPS and a managed Nextcloud instance, so that i dont have to worry about keeping a backup for my nextcloud files.
I still donât quite understand where your issues with the mail service you had were. The âMailâ part in nextcloud is just a mailclient like thunderbird/k-9/fairmail. it doesnt really have anything to do with hosting the mailserver except setting the correct configuration to reach the mailserver.
TLDR; Donât try to host mail yourself. its way too much effort.
thanks for the tip Iâd definitely look into that.
the reason I left Hetzner wasnât at all related to the mail or Nextcloud. I registered to the 1TB Nextcloud shared hosting plan. unlike you, I didnât opt for a Hetzner VPS, which limited me to a Nextcloud ONLY server.
I later realised that Iâd like to deploy several other programmes aside from Nextcloud (onlyoffice, anytype, penpot and more) and didnât like the limitations of the Nextcloud only shared hosting. I needed a VPS, which is the route youâve taken.
my problem is that Iâll use Nextcloud as my primary project storage system and I normally need to store very large files (thatâs why I went for the 1TB plan initially) which costs about âŹ5 pm. however, the equivalent of 1TB of storage VPS that Hetzner offers costs a few hundred euros a month and isnât an option for me.
Contabo on the other hand offers 1TB Ubuntu VPS for about the same price as the only Nextcloud plan Hetzner offers and this is why I intended to make the switch and left Hetzner.
(thereâs another Linux VPS provider that offers the same plan for a similar fee called alphavps, they might be more reliable)
This canât be true unless you got a very unique special offer that is not advertised on their website. According to their website the largest VPS in terms of storage they offer costs âŹ61.50 and has 600GB of storage. https://contabo.com/en/vps/
At Contabo you can get NVMe or SSD. For 16,66⏠a month you can get 300 GB NVMe or 1,2 TB SSD. But 16,66⏠is still more than 5âŹ.
With more freedom, storage is probably always more expensive than with a fixed application. Managed Nextcloud only makes sense if you really only need Nextcloud and the Managed Nextcloud also has the right range of functions.
Sometimes it can make sense to split it up.
Managed Nextcloud as a data tomb but with limitations.
Yes, VM storage tends to be much more expensive because itâs block storage dedicated to a VM which, depending on the underlying technology, may or may not allow thin provisioning. And as you said, itâs usually also sitting on a higher performance NVMe storage pool, which results in a higher cost per GB.
The storage used for basic file storage services such as Storage Shares or Storage Box and similar services is typically shared storage served from slower spinning rust pools, so itâs cheaper per GB and pricing is based on average usage because many users wonât use the full 1TB or whatever their plan offers.
Or you could mount a âStorage Boxâ or âStorage Shareâ as an external Storage to your VPS. Not sure how well that would perform, but itâs certainly possible.
Oh wow. Thatâs actually incredibly cheap, even if you take the 200Mbps bandwidth limit into account and the fact that itâs âonlyâ SSD storage, which probably means higher latency and lower IOPS than dedicated NVMe block storage.
Oh, and if your goal is to install Nextcloud directly on this server, depending on how many users you have and whether you want to use additional apps like Nextcloud Office, Talk, etc., the âŹ9.50 variant with 8GB of RAM and 400Mbps bandwidth might be an even better deal.
Yeah, offers that sound almost too good to be true are often achieved by massively overbooking the server infrastructure, which can lead to all sorts of issues. However, I have no personal experience with Contabo, so I canât say whether they do this or how reliable they are in general.
to sum it up, I believe you have more experience than me setting up a VPS so generally asking; @bb77 suggested to go for the âŹ9.5 Contabo vps offer and set up the whole Nextcloud suite on it next to the other self hosted apps I want to deploy. or is it better to go for @devnull 's strategy and split it up?
initially I found out that I couldnât run Onlyoffice on Hetzner Nextcloud shared hosting plan. maybe I missed something because I was already fed up with Hetzner at that time. but as far as I understand, you need to deploy Onlyoffice aside from Nextcloud and then use Onlyofficeâs Nextcloud integration to connect them. this wasnât possible on hetzner because I had no way to deploy Onlyoffice and would have to purchase storage from them.
also, any good suggestions for email providers? @Baspla suggested mailbox.org.
