Nextcloud

It's hard to mess around in the self host space at any level and not hear about Nextcloud. Started in 2016 as a fork of ownCloud, it's quietly become huge — 400,000+ deployments at last count, from little family file servers all the way up to entire governments running on it. It's written in PHP which is exactly as fun as that sounds, and TBH it's about as close as the FOSS world gets to real enterprise software — for better and worse.

What I actually use it for

For the first few years, it was honestly nothing. It was one of those services that seemed like a good idea, but I found very few real uses for. But after time, and some improvements by the team, I began to use it more and more. Nextcloud overlaps A LOT with some of my other services but I think it really shines as a Google Docs replacement.

Contracts, bills, insurance docs. All the boring stuff that you never need, until you do, and then you can never find. Nextcloud is perfect for this as it has encryption at rest, password protection, and access-gated sharing.

What surprised me

WebDAV syncing. I can't speak much to the efficacy of the file syncing, or the Android implementation. But CardDAV / CalDAV contacts and calendars to my iPhone are crazy useful. It replaces the need for iCloud calendar or contact syncing, which opens up for usage of those features without storing any data on an external server. Additionally, Nextcloud contacts has full information enrichment including photos, addresses, birthdays, etc. This allowed me to set up fully featured contacts without fear of leaking or exposing anyone's personal information. Set it up in an afternoon and haven't thought about it since.

What I actually did

TBH, this is one of the services that I would say requires some real experience or knowledge to set up, especially if you are using SSL, a reverse proxy, or Collabora. I had genuine issues and some hours-long debugging sessions. Once it's set up it works pretty well but setting up, updating, configuring Nextcloud is a real effort.

Would I recommend it

Ultimately yes, but I think a lot could be improved. On one hand it does a lot in one service, and for some people this could replace their entire SaaS stack based on what you use. But at the same time, the PHP of it all, combined with the more enterprise-leaning mentality, makes it a bit difficult to deal with at times. It could be argued that it would be easier and you would get more out of self hosting if you instead used a specific service for each of the features that Nextcloud provides.