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.

  • variantsEnglish
    7·
    2 months 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·
      2 months 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·
        2 months 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.