Thank you for the clarification.
Like I say, I am a newcomer to the platform, but I am wondering, would it be reasonable to suggest that these considerations point to a design limitation in Nextcloud?
It appears that the presumed use case is that an administrator would determine the applications and encryption settings that all apply to all users. In a firm or organization, this assumption may be valid, but many individuals are, like I am, are seeking a way to get personal use from a single account, but still wanting access to the full range of features and extensibility of the platform.
If a VPS is the only solution, then it is an extremely inefficient effect. A VPS entails a complete installation of the OS, plus the overhead of virtualization, an enormous marginal increase on hardware resources compared to adding an account to an existing Nextcloud instance that is accessed periodically. For simple needs, like storage capacities of around 5GB and occasional background synchronization of incremental data updates, then the cost difference is very substantial. Can an OS installation be restricted to 5GB of storage, or is 50GB a more reasonable requirement? In practical terms, from reviewing service options, the cost difference between shared and VPS service is roughly one order of magnitude.
Whatever the needs are for performance, as long as they are in the lower range, then the most efficient solution would not be a VPS rather than a shared Nextcloud deployment.
Shouldnât the design of Nextcloud reflect these considerations? Wouldnât the platform have a greater benefit to a broader range of users if it had a design that could accommodate a higher level of per-user configuration, where private individuals can share a deployment with strangers for a low cost and still select their own application set and encryption configuration?