Hey, so I recently had the idea of proposing some new ideas, I had for the IT infrastructure of my local scouts organisation, mainly it’s own nextcloud instance and website (and if that works well, maybey a matrix server and wiki, but website and nextcloud are much higher priority right now). But, I am wondering, what the best way to do the hosting would be. Using a VPS would be pretty nice, because there would be no upfront cost, but we would have to pay monthly fee and that’s pretty hard to pitch for a new and untested idea, especially because we don’t have that much regular funds/income. The other option would be to self host on hardware that stays in the building, but I am not quite shure, but then we would have a pretty steep upfront cost and I am not 100 percent shure, if we even have a proper network in the building.
The main thing, I am trying to ask here is, if any of you have ever done something similar before and if so, how you did it. Also I am thankful for any advice in general. I have done this already for my family, but doing this for an entire organistation is an entirely different thing. Thank you very much in advance!
VPS is not that much, especially if you aren’t storing a ton of media. Digital Ocean and Hetzner are good places to look. This will also prevent some networking headaches you’re likely to have hosting it “on prem”.
If part of your reason for doing this is to involve the kids in the process, then it’s better to do it locally. Someone in the org has or can find an unused desktop computer that you guys can have fun with for pretty much zero cost. You will probably have trouble trying to connect to it from outside your network though.