In the land of all the self hosted solutions. What are your best practices / options for business and general admin tasks?
So far we are thinking of setting up a NAS, Paperlessngx for document scanning, FreePBX for phone system, they have accounting software and employee time tracking software. Planning to use nextcloud, running on Proxmox including backups to NAS, with tailscale for 2 people to get in from outside, photoprism for photo storage, portainer.
The goal is a simple, clean, hands off, ways to cut down, centralize the general business work flow. This is a from scratch build and start. All options welcome, the point is to explore ideas. Full production environment for a small business. 1 or 2 office people, 1 to 10 employees. Using a gaming rig mid high end specs which is way overkill for this setup but it might grow depending on this post.
I am looking to FOSS-ify a local business. It’s a service based business, that also does manufacturing which is growing rapidly to overtake the service side it seems this is their goal anyhow.
This is our time to shine! To show how far we have come and what we can now do! An exciting project.
Late to the party, but I’ve read that OP is going to be the sole admin. Do Not Do This. I admire what you are trying to do, but ultimately, you will have no rest, no vacation, no backup for yourself. The hardware & software aren’t the issue here - it is the human support of those services. You will put a single point of failure on yourself, and likewise your peers.
Many of the FOSS projects you mentioned have commercial services. SAAS exists for a reason. By subscribing to those services as a business, you underwrite their ability to provide the software for free to the community. It’s a win-win.
second this.
also look into HR services. they handle most HR things plus many have products that do the HR stuff like time tracking, payroll, benefits, state/country compliance/regulatory requirements, etc.
it can be costly but the cost is higher when you factor in your time away from running your business and increased legal risk from breaking employment laws.
once you get large enough you can hire a director of HR and reduce you reliance on your vendor.
The comments seen to be going of in tangents. For a small business self hosted solutions are great, provided you have backups.
Here’s my 2 cents: Install proxmox or another hypervisor, as it will provide snapshot based auto-backups directly to your NAS nfs share. You may additionally configure an additional vm for testing other things/docker images.
Also configure your NAS to auto backup to a third location for backup snapshots.
You may configure additional vms for the accounting and time management software.
I would recommend separate vms for enterprise/commercial solutions and self hosted ones, as the support for enterprise solutions WILL blame you for anything that goes wong with their software (your XYZ software did abc and broke our product, so no support for you).
Dedicate 1 VM for self hosted products and as far as possible use docker, as it provides another level of segregation between services. Docker compose would further help you with internal networking and volume management.
On the docker VM, I would recommend postgres, NGINX Proxy Manager, Uptime Kuma on the same docker network.
I haven’t had the time to implement LDAP & SSO myself yet but it would ease your life in the long run to set it up at the beginning.
Good luck.
A gaming rig is a waste of money because you don’t need a fast gpu on a such a server. You want a boring server box and even better one with built-in “ilo” remote management.
hm. i actually use gpu a lot for local ollama that is connected to stuff like homeassistant, onyx, openwebUI etc… and OP said business stuff…so i guess uploading a PDF to openwebUI is a valid local use case to have gpu.
OP listed the apps they want to run and none of that was on their list
I think the thing with self hosting is that it’s a hobby, and when it goes wrong, it’s part of the hobby to figure it out. But in terms of business, then it becomes a risk. By all means try and use FOSS to improve solutions. I use a self hosted dropbox / file delivery to clients as it can saturate my 1Gbps fibre which is faster than most cloud file shares, but only because if it goes wrong one day, it’s a 2 min job to use a cloud solution instead (temporarily) and email clients with the alternative solution. But I would never build something up that only ever worked via one system.
Don’t just have data backups, have service backups. And in that regard, you may decide it’s just easier to do as others have said and use enterprise solutions from the start.
If using a self hosted Office suite, have all files duped into a single Google Drive account for example. That way you’re only paying for one Google account and have an emergency backup solution in place. EDIT: I’ve just recently degoogled and use Infomaniak in Europe for my office suite backup as its free for the 1st user. Experimenting with other non-Google/Microsoft solutions might be part of your journey.
You may decide the savings aren’t worth the effort in what you’re trying to achieve. EDIT: but I want to add that this is all part of the fun of what we do: thinking outside the box!
For business? What’s the value to the business over services like Office 365?
Personally, unless there’s a very good reason for it, I strongly recommend against this. I used to work for a company that did business IT, and there were far too many times we got called in to take over for a guy that did it himself and got in over his head, left the company, or just plain died, and it ended up costing the company much more in the long run.
Although I agree that if it’s a small business, it’s better to outsource it to an established business but if you’re serious about doing it yourself, check out OpenDesk/OpenCode. Also, why use your own hardware? A VPS is much more reliable.
