Self-hosting in 2023: Nextcloud on Linode, or...?

Hey,

So I would probably avoid Amazon just because many of their services charge for data out. It isn't out, but it's a variable for you, and you probaly want something that's flat per month. Cheapest you are going to get with somewhat reliable service is either going to be Hetzner or BuyVM. Hetzner is better for someone who doesn't want to tinker, BuyVM for those who do (BuyVM is a little less reliable, but you can set it up cheaper if you are willing to do a little bit of manual work with shell commands).

Secondly, I'd suggest you host this through Cloudron. It helps you handle automatic security updates and backups. It's very nice, and worth paying for, although it's a little pricey for individuals.

Third, with email, you can host it yourself (in fact Cloudron has this built in), but I'm going to recommend against it, or at least recommend that you pipe important emails through another service like Fastmail. Let me explain why. There's going to be some point after hosting for 5 years, where your server is going to go down. Now email will be fine, it's built to deal with cases where servers go down, but... we rely so much on email right now, that it's going to really suck to have it down. So by all means, have your personal email come to the server, but keep anything that you can't do without running on a managed service. You can pipe it through your own domain, and set up automatic forwarding, but it's going to be a little better to run important stuff through someone else's server, imho.

Just my two (or three, I guess) cents.

If you're worried about costs, I run Nextcloud locally in my house, and just deal with the fact it's not externally available. Everything syncs when it is in the house, which is just about always for the laptops and pretty often for the cell phones, and when it is out and about it just doesn't. It all works out.

I have a backup process running on it, but back up disk space is a lot cheaper than live disk space attached to a VM, so it's a lot cheaper than the requisite VM disk space would be.

That said:

"and I think I know how to get that done without getting snagged by one of their runaway expense traps, but I'm not completely sure. I do not trust them not to find some way to slip a thousand dollar bill past me before I realize what their automated system is doing."

This is a per-service concern. EC2 may be old & busted & "just VMs, dude, get cloud native you early 2000s buffoon" & totally uncool... but also precisely because it is just a VM, it is also bounded. It won't blow up on you, because you can't just use 100 times the service you expected. Worst you can do is use the network like crazy, and for as expensive as bandwidth is at large scales, at this scale it's not going to break your bank unless you really screw up. I'm bounded by the fact my home network connection won't let me go too crazy anyhow. (Or on a small T3 instance you can turn on unlimited credits and then run those up, but there's a bound on how large that can be even if you're running 100% full time and it's not huge.)

Just some options. Mastadon is presumably more complicated to run on local resources, you'd still need something with a public IP that can be reached to work correctly.

Proxmox with ZFS and zfs-auto-snapshot - rock solid, fully encrypted [3](german) and not too power hungry. On my Homeserver

  Fujitsu D3417-B2
  Xeon 1225v5
  32GB ECC RAM
  Pico PSU 150W
  Samsung 980 Pro NVMe

it takes only 9.3 Watt idle after some optimizations and you can choose ready LXC containers like https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ or https://github.com/extremeshok/xshok-proxmox to partly automate some of the installations.

It can even run macOS VMs[1] and raspberry pi virtualized[2]

Works great so far and way better than TrueNAS Scale (at least atm) or bare metal linux systems. Needs some research and learning though[4].

[1]: https://www.nicksherlock.com/2022/10/installing-macos-13-ven...

[2]: https://azeria-labs.com/emulate-raspberry-pi-with-qemu/

[3]: https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/proxmox-stammt...

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCjuiIswXGs&list=PLT98CRl2Kx...

Buy a Minisforum UM350. Install Linux on it. Set up Tailscale on it and all devices you want to have access to its internal services. Set up Nextcloud on it.

There you go, $300 one-time cost, and you have a very powerful private server that can run all your self-hosted stuff. Via Tailscale, it can even expose some services to the public internet, if you feel the desire to do so.

Don't expect too much from Nextcloud – it will not be a 1:1 replacement for commercial services from Google, Microsoft, etc.

Prepare to spend much time debugging, configuring, reading tickets, etc. If you only want files and Cloud office, consider using alternatives like Seafile[1] or the new OwnCloud rewrite in Go called OCIS[2], which are MUCH more stable than Nextcloud.

[1]: https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ [2]: https://github.com/owncloud/ocis

That's a reasonable plan. And I 100% agree that controlling your data is preferable to having it mined.

What frustrates me, and why I don't do it any more, is we don't have a manageable story for most things. In many cases there's a good recipe you can follow to stand up the basic service. But hardening, security patching, etc. aren't covered. You have to come up with your own solution to make sure it's up, etc. On top of that, projects come and go, and someone may unfortunately choose a project that's a dead end and won't be patched. (And big-budget cloud doesn't solve many of these issues, either).

My personal fear is that a lot of self-hosted stuff becomes like all the unpatched Wordpress sites, years ago, that were just vectors for hacks. It wasn't that the data was stolen, they were pretty much pwned to launch other attacks. There are just too many solutions out there for all the bits and pieces needed to keep stuff up and secure. And all those fiddly bits are hand-integrated (for the most part). I'd like to find something that provided me a full stack, with all the boxes checked. I would get monitoring and security patching around all the bits.

In the interim, I try to use products from companies that either don't primarily make money by advertising based on my data (even if the products are more expensive). (Note that advertising is what you do when you're out of real ideas - so it's inevitable that all companies head that way when MBAs with no imagination want a safe return). Or, I use products that are (as much as possible) open source. (There are still disturbing amounts of proprietary blobs in my Raspberry Pi homely servers, for example).

With all that said, I wish you luck! I've run my own infra in the past and it's fun.

Just get the oracle free tier. I've read my share of FUD about how bad oracle cloud supposedly is, but went ahead anyway. It's been something like 3 years, no complaints (including ~1.5 years of running their 4-core ARM/24 GiB RAM/200 GB HDD machine).

https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#always-free

I've used many other free tiers over the years (living in a low-income region you pretty much have to), and they make it difficult to fuck up your trial and go over the free limit. With GCP or AWS (especially AWS) it's trivial to start running paid resources and be surprised with a large bill at the end. Here you have to explicitly opt into it by clicking through multiple dialogs and confirming via an email link.

Hetzner has a hosted 1TB Nextcloud for ~$5 a month. IMHO with that price, it makes no sense to selfhost it.

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

There is really no benefit to self-hosting for an individual's basic productivity tools. Just back up your files. When your managed hoster becomes insufferable, upload your backed-up files to a new managed hoster. You will spend 100x more time (and money) curating your self-hosted thing than just backing up and uploading once or twice in your lifetime.

I have switched email providers 3 times in 25 years. With the last one, I bought a domain and pay for custom domain hosting. I don't have to think about my e-mail again until the next time I switch in 10 years. When I switch, I'll just sign up for the new provider and sync my IMAP folder over, change MX records, and boom: done. No paying for a VPS, no maintaining software patches or server or network issues, no e-mail administration or web interface administration or dealing with spam or IP reputation or anything else. It's all taken care of.

Hello!

At Swiftpoll -- https://swiftpoll.net (The best polling app on the web! We promise!), we use a combination of Racknerd (https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/) and Contabo (https://contabo.com/en!)

For our Gitlab runners, the metrics server, and the test server, we use Racknerd. For the production server, we use Contabo.

Racknerd costs about $10-30 per year per virtual machine. Racknerd runs crazy sales, such as black Friday's double bandwidth deals and free giveaways (https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/182479). Over 1000+ pages of craziness on lowendtalk!

The only caveat we have with Racknerd is the lack of support as a terraform provider. Racknerd uses Solus, and unfortunately, we did not have access to the admin APIs, such as reinstalling instances. To solve this, we made a playwright library that automated installation and maintenance tasks on the Racknerd Solus control panel.

For Swiftpoll production, we went with a Contabo instance in their St. Louis data center. Contabo has support as a terraform provider with APIs to do just about anything you'd like. It works out of the box, and we didn't need to create anything hacky in Javascript, which we loved. Our only caveat is Contabo may charge "setup fees" when making changes to instances. Contabo costs about $9 per month and up.

We have been using Racknerd and Contabo for a year. So far, we did not encounter any problems. We keep our hosting costs under $50 a month. Downtime with either provider is super rare, and I don't remember when the last time it happened was. Both providers offer generous bandwidth measured in terabytes.

I really like Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/.

Similar offer and simplicity as DigitalOcean, but way lower prices. I had to reach support a few months ago, and they were pretty responsive.

They also show the prices per month, not per hour/milisecond/byte/whatever. As I'm also the one paying the invoices, I really like that.

FWIW I'd throw my hat in the ring for Vultr as an alternative to Linode or DO. (Disclaimer I used to work there) Prices right on par with the competition, one click nextcloud, good support. And they are independent, not a subsidiary (like Linode now is of Akamai) and not VC funded (like DO)

Trying out self-hosting is almost as addictive as trying out note managers :-)

Anyway, here's my current setup:

- Hetzner Cloud VPS -- https://www.hetzner.com/cloud -- I use it for a public website - https://vlad.studio/ - otherwise I'd get the cheapest option); 4€/mo

- 1Tb Hetzner Storage -- https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box -- mounted as an external drive to the server above; € 3.81

- Filerun -- https://www.filerun.com/ -- used as web interface and file manager, instead of NextCloud. I wanted to like NextCloud, but couldn't. Filerun looks nice. It is not as complex .

- Various mobile Nextcloud-compatible apps connect to my Filerun instance. I'm not happy with this part of setup yet.

What’s the point of replacing one corporation with another (especially if you have to maintain the server yourself)?

Host it on cheap hardware at home, with plenty of RAM and CPU. If the power is off for 15min, that doesn’t matter for personal use.

As a plus, you can host it in plaintext (or at least, load the LUKS key), so that applications can index your data, allowing a lot of cool stuff. You can lock it in down more strictly, tailoring it to your specific environment.

Get a Raspberry Pi 4 and install https://umbrel.com on it. Easy to set up using Tailscale and optional TOR support if that's something you want. And it has all the "important" stuff like Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Pi-hole, Matrix server, etc.

There's a bunch of Bitcoin related Apps as well but it's easy to just ignore those.

Full list of "apps" here: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-apps

Your approach is nice and easy and sensible. I personally preferred hetzner to linode (which has a history of bad security) but I imagine the minimum price is higher.

When you’re ready to reduce prices and increase privacy, take a look at a tiny (like t3a.micro or .nano) ec2 instance that forwards to/from your “real” server at home which can be beefier. The home server maintains a vpn connection to the ec2 instance. you also need to configure nat and port forwarding on both sides so you’ll need to get your hands dirty with nftables/netfilter (probably a night or two of pain realistically).

Once it’s set up and working and you can get your monthly spend down to $3-$4 (I pay up front for three years of ec2 credits). You need your own hardware but a used nuc for example is pretty cheap and adding storage is a matter of buying an external usb hard drive.

And if you stick to https/tls (via letsencrypt) the Amazon forwarding instance can’t see what’s in your traffic (just which ips are visiting you and when).

(You could obviously cut Amazon out entirely if you’re comfortable hosting directly from your home ip but I never wanted to deal with the potential isp headaches.)

Honestly I've tried all of the VPS services and they're problematic. They are barrel scraping companies generally and some services literally block their entire networks. And occasionally their data centres catch fire. And of course the moment you get a minor billing issue you find all your VMs also catch fire. Also with any VPS, don't expect to be able to send emails from it. That's not going to happen even if you manage to beg enough for them to let you send them because no one will listen to SMTP from a VPS.

If I was going to go with anyone I would use AWS. Their stuff works better than any other company I've found and also support is actually existent. But expect to pay for it.

I don't want to pay for it so I keep my DNS and static web content on S3/CloudFront/R53 and let Apple handle the cloudy shit like email, calendars etc. Both AWS and iCloud+ cost me about £4 a month in total.

Someone will own you in one way or another. Better to leverage that and have an exit plan than not leverage it and cost yourself time, money and sanity because that's the real outcome of what you want to do.

The flip side of 'stop relying on some faceless entity to manage it' is that it is a LOT of work to keep something like this up and running. Google automate it and have a ton of engineers to tend to things. But everyone else has to take care of software upgrades, security patching, backups and restore, cyber threats etc.

In the long run, independence is worth something. It is just costly.

I dropped all GAFAM services. Nextcloud, Gitea, Matrix, Sonarr, Lidarr, Radarr etc can cover it all. You will have to put in a little work to self host these, or a little money to have someone else host them, but now you are paying with time and money instead of your privacy and identity.

If you are into self hosting swing by #!:matrix.org

I've been on TornadoVPS (formerly prgmr.com) for ~a decade and it's been fine. They lack the ability to do lots of storage like you may need for this project. If you can configure Nextcloud to use s3 or a competitor's clone for storage I think that would be a reasonable, measured exposure to Amazon/Google/Microsoft and you'll get to take advantage of their high reliability where you really need it.

https://tornadovps.com/

Why not run it from your home network? You're likely already paying for home Internet, and since most of the access will be local, it'll be neither slow nor will it cost anything.

Don't forget that running your stuff and putting your data onto servers belonging to big corporations means that even if they're not scanning everything the way Google scans your email, they can still access it, so it's better, but not worry free.

I'm running Nextcloud on a shared webhosting and have mounted a Hetzner storage box as external storage into it. That comes down to around 7 €/month for hosting costs, which I find fair.

I'm using the Nextcloud Android client, which could be better but does its job, to sync photos from my phone to the cloud. That can also be configured quite nicely to have specific folders for uploads, that should help you with keeping stuff seperate with several devices.

I've no experience with the office suite to be honest, never really looked into that.

Using shared hosting will come with the benefit that you will, most likely, have custom TLD to run your mail from/to. Shared hosting also does regular backups without you taking care about that etc. etc.

I'd say you should get yourself a Hetzner "Level 4" shared webhosting for domain, mail and "root" of the Nextcloud and then mount a storage box into that. Should be around 9 €/month then.

I'd encourage hosting out of your home if possible: For an upfront cost of maybe an Intel NUC or equivalent, you get capacity that's dirt cheap. I run Sandstorm and let Cloudflare's cache handle the brunt of any of the public websites I have so that doesn't hit my house.

I don't have a ton of concerns about publicly-accessible Sandstorm, but if you're using something else, either Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale are relatively good options to hide your home connection and secure your access to your server from the public.

I'm not super hot on Nextcloud as a product, I tested it and found it slow and janky. It's exceedingly popular, but there's a lot of better apps out there if you run something that can spin up some containers.

I'm using an old dell optiplex fx 160 (intel atom n230 / 3gb ram / 500Gb hdd) as my personal server. The Nextcloud web interface is almost unusable, but since I use it only to synchronize my files across my phone and my computer it does not really matter.

Whenever you consider going self-host, consider what REDUNDANCY and DOWNTIME are worth to you.

Sure you can use an old computer and host at home much cheaper than AWS / Azure / etc. But on AWS / Azure / etc if the physical machine your VM is running on dies, your VM moves to another physical box within seconds without you having to do anything, within seconds, and without data loss. What is that WORTH to you?

That said, you can get a Synology NAS (easy) or build your own NAS (harder) and run Nextcloud in Docker. In the event of hardware failure (it will happen, it's just a matter of when), you'd just have to bring that Docker container + backing storage back up on the replacement gear.

Linode. I've been a customer for almost 15 years. Has never served me wrong.

Depends on your budget I guess.

A dedicated server on something like Hetzner is ~£50 a month, put portainer or proxmox (or portainer inside proxmox) and run whatever you want.

Use traefik to direct things.

Use backblaze, or hetzner boxes etc as storage backups etc

Rather than hosting in the cloud, you might consider using Docker Desktop (or Podman, or Rancher) on a used Windows laptop along with a tunneling solution (I maintain a list here[0]) which gets around NAT/CGNAT and keeps your IP address private. Something like Cloudflare Tunnel is the easiest, but you can also selfhost your own server in which case your VPS is simply a relay.

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

I'm in the process of standing up my own hardware (1U server/some simple compute box + FreeNAS) for doing this.

There's a variable I don't understand with self-hosted cloud/storage: what guarantees do you have that they're not peeking at what you store? Why do you trust them over $CORP? Do you encrypt your data at-rest (dm-crypt, fscrypt, etc.), and do block storage providers support this?

edit: fix typo

1) what is your budget?

2) how much stuff are you planning on hosting?

3) how much bandwidth do you need?

nextcloud was (I've not checked recently) very hard to secure properly, so you'll probably want to hide it behind a VPN or some such.

The other thing to think about is the amount of time you have budgeted for initial setup, and on going maintenance. you will need to have backups, and those backups need to be tested.

For hosting, you need disk space, so if you have enough bandwidth at home, its car cheaper to have a low power server with a couple of big disks in it, than it would be to host that data on S3/other block storage.

AWS will be much more expensive than linode or DO. assuming you are not using the managed services.

finally, I would advise getting your physical instances controlled via ansible or terraform, and if you are using docker, get that config in some sort of repo, so you can teardown and bring up your infra on demand. This make disaster recovery much easier (or porting)

> I want to get all my email history backed up somewhere other than gmail's servers on an ongoing basis.

I thought I wanted this, then realized I really can live without all the old emails. Once you decide that you're left with photos and that's about it, which makes archiving easier.

You can also consider hosting it at home. More than likely you've got fiber at home, with decent capacity, and you need (1) closet (2) UPS (3) static IP from ISP with a decent firewall/router. It's not ideal, but a lot cheaper and could be perfect for what you need.

I found that namecheap's VPC offering was the best price when I shopped around. I needed 2+ cores and 5+ Gi. They sell 4 Cores/6Gi for $15.88 monthly (or save money with quarterly/annual commitments.

It beat AWS's m5a.large's 3 year RIs ($27/mo) & 3 year compute savings plan ($31/mo) (no upfront).

It beat Azure's D2a v4's 3 year RI ($30.75)

It best GCP's e2-standard-2's 3 year committed use pricing ($22/mo)

It beat Digital Ocean's 2 CPU 4Gi Shared ($24/mo)

It beat Vultr's 2CPU 4Gi Shared ($20/mo).

It beat Linode's 1CPU 4Gi Shared ($20/mo).

I just heard about hetzner.com from this post, and it seem like they can beat namecheap's pricing. Hetzner's CPX31 offers 4 CPU / 8Gi for ~$14.77/mo. I might have to check them out

You could get a somewhat managed NextCloud instance on Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share (but it appears that it's not yet available in their US datacenters) Of course you could also self-host on Hetzner (they do have US datacenters in general, just not every service they offer), which is pretty cheap.

There's also https://www.pikapods.com/ that offers to host it for you in a simplified manner if you don't wont all the server hassle.

If I was doing Nextcloud alone, then I would be using Hetzner storage share. I run other things alongside Nextcloud so I'm using a single Hetzner VPS.

There's a lot of Hetzner in this thread, and in my comment. There's a reason for that.

Rhea [BOT]: The user is looking for a solution to manage their data storage that isn't relying on a faceless entity. The user wants to use a Nextcloud office suite for text documents and spreadsheets, store photos and videos in a backup collection, and back up their email history. They are considering using AWS or Linode, or Digital Ocean, and possibly adding in a Mastadon server for ActivityPub. The current plan is to use Nextcloud on Linode for a while and see how it goes, but the user is open to other suggestions.

For backing up photos I highly recommend immich. It is a self hosted google photos replacement under active developement.

https://github.com/immich-app/immich

One of my fears is that Google will shut down my account because some algorithm of theirs says so, and since there is no customer support to appeal to, I'd lose my primary inbox. That would be catastrophic enough, but I'd also potentially lose access to all other accounts that use that email address for recovery or to send login links/passwords. So one of my next to-dos is to set up an email on a domain I own for these critical recovery scenarios.

I would suggest evaluating this for yourself.

Good luck!

Host Nextcloud at home on your own little server. Also, setup Wireguard server at home, so that you can still access everything locally by VPNing back to your home network. That is how I do it.

I am happy with the synology server i have at home. I don't have to setup the server on my own but sftp, docker, nginx is included already. Mostly i just use it as remote storage for files.

I'm using a Qnap NAS. It has its own operating system but you can really install anything on it if you are dedicated enough.

One thing: Get the 3/4 drives models. I thought two drives will be enough, but I actually had an instance where one drive failed and the second drive quickly failed after that (thankfully I had already swapped the first defective drive with a newer one). But it could have been possible that two drives go bad at the same time.

Also take a look at Owncloud OCIS. It looks truly compelling, they invested something like 5 years into a proper file syncing solution that can be federated, etc.

I use https://racknerd.com/ was lucky to get a good vps for 19$ a year (A YEAR).

Just go to https://www.kimsufi.com/en-ie/dedicated-servers/ and grab a cheap dedicated server with 1TB+ HDD.

How do you protect your data from accidental loss then? Simply backup using Restic to a Backblaze B2 bucket.

And that's how you get dirt cheap self hosted services.

I recently setup PhotoPrism[0] on my NAS and am happy with it.

0: https://photoprism.app/

If you take a sibling commentator's suggestion to stand up something at home, there's always older, beyond-upstream-support rackmount servers to be had on Craigslist for a song. You'll end up upping your electrical bill in the process, but it's a fun option if you want to homelab it as a hobby.

Nextcloud AIO/hetzner's template on a Hetzner VPS.

Or you can just rent a storage share, a managed nextcloud instance, hosted by hetzner. https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Gonna give another rec to DigitalOcean, we use it for work as well and haven't had any major issues.

I just switched away from Digital Ocean after years of using them. Simply because they stopped providing a FreeBSD image. I now use Vultr and they're fine, except that I have to solve two captchas many times a day (maybe because I'm not in the US).

Contabo user here, no complain in a couple of years using between one and two VPS. 0 downtime.

i will echo what others have said, avoid aws for the higher charges, a cheap vps should be plenty

i run nextcloud on a vps from a gaming provider and got it hauling, heres a few things i learned

- avoid the snap of nextcloud, i could not get it working 100% (many apps would mysteriously not work etc), i am using a manual install from zip w zero issues

- if you are planning on using s3 as backing store, set it up BEFORE any users, otherwise you may lose data on disk. with that said, i use local storage and backup to s3, using s3 as the backing store in nextcloud made it obviously slow

once youre setup i recommend tuning php-fpm following their guides

Learn how to use the cost control tools on aws. I don't know what you're doing, but I don't see how a single user storing documents and media can end up with a massive bill.

+1 for the Cloudron recommendations. You can use it to selfhost nextcloud and many other apps on linode/digitalocean/hetzner/vultr/what have you.

I don't know about the application layer but for decent cost bare metal hosting I've recently discovered, and have had good experiences with Hivelocity.

If feasible I'd suggest hosting at home. Much more versatile and getting a similar amount of horsepower in the cloud is going to be pricy

OVH for me. I rent a bare metal server ($80/mo) for development and a use an OVH VM for my personal site. Their DDoS mitigation seems legit.

Doesn't really help OP, but if there's anyone out there just wanting to host static content, I recommend GitHub Pages.

All this discussion about Nextcloud in a thread about Linode.

With Hosting, you largely pay for reputation. Reliable/trustworthy providers are gonna cost more.

On one end of the spectrum you have good-enough-for-the-CIA AWS. $$$

On the other end of the spectrum you have communists running Data Centers out of their basement. $

I suggest Linode. Super reliable provider, much less price than the big names. I would expect the same service out of DigitalOcean, Vultr... just pick the company where you like the owners honestly. Linode's the one me teacher used tho.

Assuming you got the income, $40/mo for 8GB should be good enough to run a ton of hobby projects. Or maybe $20 for 4GB to start, I think Linode lets you upgrade droplets.

Avoid AWS. Using AWS for a hobby project is retarded. Its meant for enterprise.

Option B would be to use a RaspberryPi. Its extra work for less performance, but Pis are a lot of fun. Its like owning a toy that can run NextCloud.

If you're getting into self-hosting btw check out https://yunohost.org/ and https://landchad.net/

Is there a easy self host alternative to Vercel for next js apps?

Digital Ocean + Cloud66

Check out lowendbox.com there are much much cheaper options

That's a great plan! I'll say that self-hosting may be _the_ number one thing I'm most passionate about due to concerns similar to yours (privacy, ownership, and so on). I've self-hosted many of my own services for a very long time and so I have my own experiences to share as well.

I'll say right off the bat that I don't see any red flags with your proposed plan. The following bullet points are primarily meant to offer some additional options or mental nudges to help you brainstorm - like I said, there's nothing abjectly wrong with your architecture, so this list may just offer more ideas:

- I've self-hosted a few email servers (and still do) and I think punting on that (or just doing the backup plan) is probably the right approach - you can DIY it today, but it's a part-time job. If you ever do decide to take ownership of your email, bringing your own domain to Fastmail or Proton Mail has also worked well for me. Today I host one domain on Linode and one on Ramnode. As with most things email, there are tons of nuances with doing it yourself - I had to get both my email servers' public addresses placed on an allowlist with their respective providers.

- I self-host most of my services on my own hardware in my homelab. I eschew the big, expensive, loud, power-hungry hardware in favor of smaller, cheaper, and swappable hardware, and the strategy has worked out really well. I primarily use ODroid hardware (they offer both ARM and x86-64 hardware). You mentioned a floating/non-public address as a constraint, so you could still do this with tailscale/headscale/something similar and gain the benefit of cloaking your services inside a private network (and using some public/free cloud instance as a low-power VPN endpoint). I don't think DigitalOcean/Linode are bad choices, but I very much like owning the hardware layer as well.

- I've been self-hosting before Nextcloud existed and used its progenitor (ownCloud) and developed a harsh distate for the huge, sprawling complexity of the system (it was hungry for resources, broke on upgrades constantly, etc.). That story may be better now, but I've sinced move on to hosting very targeted, smaller services. For example, instead of Nextcloud's file syncing, I run syncthing everywhere, and instead of Nextcloud's calendaring, I run radicale. Nextcloud will probably be fine, but I've been happier with running a smaller collection of services that do one thing well (syncthing in particular is an exceptional piece of software)

I could really ramble on but I'll just include a list of the stuff I host if you have any questions about it. I blog[1] about some of these, too: Transmission, Radarr, Sonarr, Jackett, Vaultwarden, espial, glusterfs, kodi, photoprism, atuin, Jellyfin, Vault, tiny tiny rss, calibre, homeassistant, mpd, apache zeppelin, and minio. Outside my lab hardware I run a few instances of nixos-simple-mailserver, mastodon, and goatcounter (used to run plausible). I also run a remove ZFS server that I mirror snapshots to as my remote backup solution.

[1]: https://blog.tjll.net/posts/