Nextcloud is one of the most used self-hosted services in my family. I am very happy how well maintained the software is. Easy to maintain, and keep up to date.

So far we use it for:

• File sharing: we keep all our documents in it.
• Our scanner uploads scans to it.
• Notes app is wonderful.
• I use Tasks app as main to-do manager: it’s important to me that it is private and that my date isn’t analyzed or shared.
• We use Deck app to organize, we recently used it to organize moving house and it made everything much easier (previously used Trello for this, but Deck does it all and keeps our data in our hands).
• I use it as backup for screenshots from my phone, and few computers: it’s great they’re all in one folder to be used anywhere.

What I don’t like is:

• You have to enter you password for each app update. It always works just fine, and it’s just annoying to paste it every time.
• There is no way to support the project as an individual user. I like it and I want it to be successfull and I would be happy to chip-in few € each month, but there is no way to do it.

I’m happy to host my own NextCloud server because I can freely register my special personal data such as going hospital schedule or daily brood pressure records without worrying about big tech censorship.

I’ve heard that a lot of people have trouble with updating and maintaining nextcloud but I personally never had those issues and my instance is running for over 5 years now. I would agree with other people here, that something like docker makes everything easier if you want to selfhost. I personally followed this guide with a custom dockerfile that looks something like this. Once you have a functional docker image and a docker-compose file, updating your instance is as easy as typing:

docker compose stop
docker compose rm -f
docker compose build --pull
docker compose up -d

If you chose to go down that route as well, you might want to change the config files in your docker image since some of the values might not suit your instance. I, for example, have added the following for the PHP config:

RUN sed -i "s/\(opcache\.interned_strings_buffer*=*\).*/\148/" /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/opcache-recommended.ini
RUN sed -i "s/\(opcache\.memory_consumption*=*\).*/\1256/" /usr/local/etc/php/conf.d/opcache-recommended.ini

I ran Nextcloud at home briefly, for maybe two weeks. Setting it up was fairly easy, but it was rather slow. Slow enough that I couldn’t get anyone else in the house to use it for longer than ten minutes. Eventually ripped it down.

I run the linuxserver.io docker image on an unraid server. I’ve generally been happy with it for notes and camera upload and file storage.

That said, there have been some hiccups:

• My system is set to auto-update docker images once a week. It took me a while to realize that updates to the docker image did not update the nextcloud install. I now have a weekly cronjob that installs nextcloud updates.

• The Android notes app occasionally gets out-of-sync with the server if I use it while offline, and then I have to wipe all of it’s data and re-configure it on my phone. A couple of times, it kept trying to create the same new document when I got back online - it worked on the server, but the app didn’t seem to recognize this and would then try again, so I ended up with hundreds of new files on the server.

  • (Hasn’t happened in a while, so maybe it’s fixed now.)

• I can’t figure out how to get the office suite to work. The Collabora Online Develpment server seems to disappear every time I reboot, and I think it’s required for Nextcloud Office to work.

• I know there’s the “all-in-one” image that is supposed to handle a lot of these issues, but I’ve tried to set it up twice and failed both times.

• My nextcloud instance used to feel really slow. It’s running on from an SSD on a relatively unloaded server with an i7 and 16gb of RAM in my house, so I really thought it should be faster than it was. It turns out the External Storage plugin was indexing all 30+ TB of my file server for each account on the server (one for myself + a few family members). I uninstalled that plugin and some of the other ones I wasn’t using, added the redis caching server, and maybe did some other tuning I’m not remembering. It now feels acceptable. Not fast, but good enough. Recent releases seem to be getting faster, so I think it’s trending in the right direction.