Hi. Some friends of mine are starting a business and they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website, run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more) and to store and remote access documents.

Im a computer savvy person so they asked me for help, but dont know much about self-hosting so I come here asking you:

What kind of hardware do they need and would be best? What OS and other software is required and recomended?
How to set it up/configure it? Im partial to foss but if there are good propietary options they are acceptable too. And last: What do we have to watch out for or avoid.

Also, space is a bit of an issue, I was thinking they could use something small like an intel nuc but Im worried that hardware would be underpowered for their needs.

I have been googling for stuff myself but I get overwhelmed by the ammount of information and some contradicting opinions so I appreciate your recomendations and guidance. Im not asking you to give me a full tutorial, although I would appreciate it too, but just to be pointed in the right direction to avoid, as much as possible, spending money and time on things they might not really need or might not perform as well.

Thanks in advance.

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    40·
    10 days ago

    So don’t take this as rude, but if none of you have experience running email for a business, you’re probably better off contracting that part out.

    It’s a lot of work to get working, keep working, and is prone to exploding for no particular reason so if this is a business-critical component, it’s worth the $20 a month to get it hosted where making your email actually deliver to people’s inbox is someone else’s problem.

    Same for the business website: if it being down is going to cost money, a simple static page like that is hostable for literally free with cloudflare or netlify or any of a couple of other providers, and that’s probably what I’d do. (And, frankly, is what I do with a lot of stuff I host.)

    As for storing and accessing remote documents, if you pay for gsuite or office365, you’ll get that included in the price, so like uh, that might be the best way to go.

    I know this is literally not what you asked, but…

    • David From Space@orbiting.observerEnglish
      13·
      9 days ago

      It sucks, but as someone who hosts their own services and supports business clients: If they have a budget, Office365 all the way. Does it suck paying money to M$? Oh hell yeah. But it’s a ‘cost of doing business’. Don’t screw around if they can afford it, just go O365 :(

      • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
        61·
        9 days ago

        I understand the ease from an admin POV, but besides locking users into a third party, corporate suite, everything UX about Office365 sucks balls.

        • young_broccoli@fedia.ioOP
          2·
          9 days ago

          Agreed. But stability and reliability would be a priority for this so like emuspawn said “cost of doing business” :c

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      10 days ago

      Agreed. For businesses, spend the couple bucks to have Microsoft or whoever put their huge resources behind keeping you online. It’s a lot better than having the server with all your services go down when you’re expecting an important email.

    • young_broccoli@fedia.ioOP
      3·
      9 days ago

      So don’t take this as rude I know this is literally not what you asked, but…

      No no no, this is the exact reason I asked. I honestly thought selfhosting would be better and easier once its all set up. Thank you very much.

      As far as I know the website is not an indispensable part of the business but its not a static page either. Its gonna be like a landing page to (hype up the business), some catalogue pages to show their products, and a page with contact info (maybe also an “about us” page. Its mainly to look more professional and to have a bit of an internet presence. What would you recommend for that? Either selfhosted or commercial solution.

      Thanks again.

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        I’m going to get downvoted to hell for this but uh, I usually tell clients Squarespace is what they want these days.

        Self-hosting something like Wordpress or Ghost or Drupal or Joomla or whatever CMS you care to name costs time: you have to patch it, back it up, and do a lot of babysitting to keep it up and secure and running. It’s very much not a ship-and-forget - really, nothing selfhosting is.

        I’m very firmly of the opinion that small business people should be focused on their business, not their email or website or whatever, because any time you spend fighting your tech stack is time you could have been actually making money. It’s all a cost, it just depends if you value $20 a month or your time more.

        If I had someone come to me asking to setup this stuff for their business, I’d absolutely tell them to use gSuite for email, file sharing, documents, and such and Squarespace for the website and then not worry about shit, because they’re both reliable and do what they say on the tin.

      • yonder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        Just btw, your requirements for the website would work just fine on a static site. A static site just means the server only serves the website and nothing else. No DBs or anything like that.

  • robalees@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    10 days ago

    Wholeheartedly agree with everyone else on the email. I’ve worked IT in a range of different sized businesses. The hardest one to date was the super paranoid place that insisted on hosting email. It’s an absolute pain to maintain and can be an unnecessary security risk for a few bucks!

  • philpo@feddit.org
    9·
    8 days ago

    They set up a business. They do business. They should ask someone to do this whose business it is. Not you. They are taking advantage of you.

    You will certainly and 100% ruin your friendship with them.

    • Keeping a server secure is an ordeal for a professional - especially when it comes to using it as a business server.

    • Doing E-Mail yourself, especially in a professional capacity, is a god damn nightmare and even most professionals refuse to do it and rather pay someone who handle it. For a reason.

    • The usecase you mentioned does not require a server. It can easily be done via a web hosting provider. Unless there is something shaddy going on and you/they are afraid of storing that stuff with a provider. But for what you mention here you need a simple web hosting provider for 5 bucks a month.

    • Actually doing that yourself is far more complicated than you imagine here. It’s not just the server. How do you get a connection with a static IPv4 to host your services? Actually preferably multiple static IPs? Are you considering a CloudFlare tunnel? How do you plan redundancy if that connection craps out? Or the server kicks the bucket. Or power goes out? This alone costs FAR more than the money you pay for a cheap webhoster or even a VPS. (Which you don’t need,imho)

    For the love of god or whoever: Don’t do that. You will be liable/responsible to them (at least from their point of view) if their IP is on Googlemails blacklist and now “that one important client mail did not arrive in time”. Or if the cheap residential DSL craps out and their very important site is just having the sale of their life?

    I am absolutely for self-hosting things, don’t get me wrong. I selfhost basically everything (but no mail…that is a shitshow), mostly on FOSS. But don’t start with someone else’s business if you start doing this. Selfhost a few easy things. Get a Mini PC and proxmox, selfhost within your home network, then expand slowly.

  • Lem453@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    8 days ago

    You don’t have the knowledge or experience to do this for a business. This is different than a personal cloud. You will be blamed when things don’t work.

    Don’t touch this with a 10ft pole.

    If you want to help, find commercial services that offer this and suggest those.

  • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
    7·
    10 days ago

    For email and calendar I’D probably look into proton. For other software tools i would start with services people like that you don’t have to manage other than be like the admin and as you go try and find alternatives and self host your own and teat it out. Maybe even something like digital ocean where you can just spin up a droplet that’s presetup for you and learn more and more until you’re comfortable to transition other people to it

    • young_broccoli@fedia.ioOP
      1·
      9 days ago

      Thanks, I’ve looked into proton, seems like a good option for mail. Digitalocean I dont really understand it but it seems more oriented towards software developement. No?

      • yrmp@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        Digital Ocean basically lets you run something called a droplet in the cloud. It’s a general purpose server more or less. Put nginx on it, start the server process, configure the DNS rules, and congrats you have a site that says hello world.

        A droplet is similar to an EC2 on Amazon Web Services. I found DOCN to be cheaper than AWS when I hosted my site there. I was going to also suggest proton and DOCN might work for your use case. You get the redundancy and uptime without needing to use your own hardware, electricity, or bandwidth.