I sometimes wonder about "managed hosting" (or whatever it is called). For instance, some providers like Hetzner or Infomaniak offer a "Nextcloud managed instance". So you pay a subscription and they maintain your Nextcloud instance for you. Which is presumably simpler and safer than doing it yourself at home.

On such an instance, one can share a folder with a friend, for instance. And I think Nextcloud is even working on federation (?).

One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but at least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that is in your country).

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bayindirh 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> One disadvantage is that they have access to your data, but at least you choose the cloud provider (maybe you want one that is in your country).

You can apparently encrypt your Nextcloud data at rest at Hetzner. I host my own Nextcloud, and I know it supports encryption, but apparently Hetzner also allows you to do so.

On the other hand, if you want a standard cloud provider, pCloud provides good encryption support. Also they have a nice FUSE based client, and they're interoperable with tons of tools, too.

Returning to Nextcloud, you can share files/folders directly (with expiration/password) or add more users with limited access to your folders.

BTW, keeping a Nextcloud instance is really easy, let it be container based or bare-metal install. It never let me down over the years.

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palata 5 days ago | parent [-]

> You can apparently encrypt your Nextcloud data at rest at Hetzner.

Doesn't it mean that they can still access your data while the server is running? I mean, they run the server, they must have access to it, right?

> pCloud provides good encryption support

You mean e2ee? If it's about sending files to an untrusted server, I use restic. Works with pretty much everything (including pCloud) :-).

> BTW, keeping a Nextcloud instance is really easy

Sure, but what I was saying is that either you do it at home and it makes it harder (you want your home LAN to be secure :-) ) or you do it on a VPS, and someone else has access to your data.

	▲	bayindirh 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Doesn't it mean that they can still access your data while the server is running? If you use "at rest" encryption, they might get the key from memory, yes. But if you use E2E (or client to client as Nextcloud says), nothing on the server would be readable, so using cryptomator/restic becomes unnecessary [0]. > You mean e2ee? Unfortunately no, pCloud doesn't use E2EE. It's at rest AFAIK. Technical details are at [1]. > Sure, but what I was saying is that either you do it at home and it makes it harder... If you want to expose your NextCloud to the world, 80/443 is enough for everything, plus Nextcloud comes with layered defenses by default (like brute force detection, etc.), and they can do your security audit, against their best practices [2]. If you don't want it to be completely visible, you can always tuck it behind a VPN. If you want to host it on a VPN, then you can enable E2EE in NextCloud, but web part becomes unusable. Instead, you can use Syncthing with untrusted folders in that case. [0]: https://nextcloud.com/encryption/ [1]: https://www.pcloud.com/features/encryption.html [2]: https://scan.nextcloud.com/

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drew_lytle 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, I think this is a super interesting path! Federation of Nextcloud would be crazy. Thanks for reading and commenting!