Finally, I’ll now cover the installation of Nextcloud on Debian! At this point, is expected that you already had: Choose a VPS provider and concluded the initial setup of your Debian server; Installed Nginx; Installed PostgreSQL; Installed PHP 8.1. I’m currently using Debian 11, but these instructions may be equally valid for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu. Read the tutorial...

This is a brief, but long owed post. Last year, I decided that the best path to claim ownership of my data was self-hosting Nextcloud.1 I faced some issues using Hetzner’s 1 vCPU plan and I convinced myself that the culprit was their vCPU not being powerful enough.2 If it’s true that their vCPU wasn’t as powerful as Vultr’s one. It’s also true that with the right know-how I would be able to debug the issue and make things work. The culprit was in fact my lack of knowledge. Read more...

On the way to install Nextcloud we’ve already completed the initial setup of our VPS, the installation of Nginx and the installation of PostgreSQL. I will now cover the installation of PHP 8.1. Why PHP 8.1? Because, PHP 7.4 has no longer active support and will have its security support ending in November 2022.1 And, PHP 8.1 is the recommended version to run Nextcloud 25.2 I’m currently using Debian 11, but these instructions may be equally valid for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu. Read the tutorial...

On the way to install Nextcloud we’ve already completed the initial setup of our VPS and the installation of a webserver (Nginx). We’ll now proceed with the installation of PostgreSQL, a relational database management system. I’m currently using Debian 11, but these instructions may be equally valid for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu. Read the tutorial...

This is the second post on the road to self-host Nextcloud. At this point we have already choosed a provider and deployed a VPS and completed its initial setup. Now, we’re going to cover the installation of Nginx, the use of Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates and the configuration of the web server to use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). I’m currently using Debian 11, but these instructions may be equally valid for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu. Read the tutorial...

This is the first of a series of posts that will cover from the deployment of a VPS up to the installation of Nextcloud. These are the kind of posts I will write mostly for future memory, but if they will be useful to you, even better. I’m not reinventing the wheel here, these are just the result of the sum of tutorials and lessons I keep learning. On this post I will cover the use of SSH to connect to a server, the creation of a new user with administrative privileges and the setup of a firewall. I’m currently using Debian 11, but these instructions may be equally valid for other versions of Debian and Ubuntu. Read the tutorial...

In the process of self-hosting Nextcloud the first step was to choose a VPS provider. It wasn’t a straightforward choice and in the process I ended up experiencing, by this order, Hetzner, DigitalOcean and Vultr. But, first of all, let me advise you that this isn’t intended to be a factual analysis, supported by quantifiable and specific data. It is rather a subjective assessment based on my use case. Therefore, I believe that your experience with these providers could be completely different. If you are into more technical and detailed analyses you can go here and here, for example. Read more...

Since a few years now I started to get concern with how much of my data was being gathered and how it was being used. Nowadays we spend a big part of our lives online and over the years companies have grown basing their business on tracking our actions. The searches we made, the sites and pages we visit, the time you spent on them… and so on. Let’s face it, Google Search was a revolution, and Gmail, OneDrive, iCloud, Facebook or Youtube are excellent products in terms of usability and features. And best of all they’re free, you would say. Are they? Read more...