Setting up a nextcloud provider?

🍱 Features & apps
1

I am very impressed with Nextcloud and all of its features. It is ready out of the box when it comes to self hosting, however can one use nextcloud and sell it as a cloud storage provider? The issues I can see from this are.

Website Domain. Lets say your nextcloud provider is nextcloud.com. I would want nextcloud,com homepage to be the homepage of the website. Could I have the nextcloud login page be cloud.nextcloud,com?

Domain Management. A user would be something like johndoe@nextcloud,com or johndoe@cloud.nextcloud,com. If a business wanted to use this service and not self host could they manage their domain name and use it on nextcloud,com. For example lets say the business wants to use there domain bakerlimited.com on nextcloud,com. Would their accounts look like johndoe@bakerlimited,com?

Storage Space. Could the service provider set who has what for storage space and allow the users to easily by an annual subscription such as 100GB for 1 year and pay using paypal? Or will this feature need to be developed ontop of nextcloud? Is it possible to freeze an user if his subscription expires and he is using more storage them he has available due to the expired subscription?

Paid Features. If a provider wanted to have certain features behind a paywall such as the chats feature or not to offer any free accounts at all, can this be done?

Licensing. Is any of the adove suggestions, questions or ideas agains Nextcloud TOS?

If Nextcloud could make this possible out of the box it will be easy for anyone to startup a cloud storage service and with Nextcloud privacy, great development and open source code it will add many cloud storage providers in the market that will be open source, federated with all other nextcloud servers and can allow for cheaper storage and with companies using nextcloud as their backbone they can contribute to the nextcloud project and donate to it. All that the providers need to do for the most part is get hosting, process transactions, customer support and not have so much focus on development and by focusing on hosting I can see cloud storage getting cheaper over time.

2

Of course.

No reason they can’t. The bigger issue that you’d probably want to deal with is making your instance available at cloud.bakerlimited.com, but that shouldn’t be difficult either.

Quotas are easy, but I’m not sure about tying them to payment.

I don’t believe so, but you can check the license for yourself here: server/COPYING at master · nextcloud/server · GitHub

3

this? → Nextcloud providers - Nextcloud

4

I think there are registration apps that help you create users. I don’t know if they have implemented payment solutions, if you want to base a business on it, you could help develop it.

The same for paid features and user management. But it’s better to get to know Nextcloud and the whole ecosystem before setting up a service for other people.