We recently received the follow email (text adjusted slightly) from a client who uses us for hosting Nextcloud on a VPS, including monthly upgrades. The relevant part is this:

The problem is that my boss is complaining and wants to move it to our own hosting. He says it will be way less to host ourselves on digital ocean and I can update it myself, I would rather not do that, so can you help us to understand why it’s worth it to stay with you?

This is a very good question — very valid. The answer we provided is also good. We answered that the boss is correct that you can host Nextcloud on DigitalOcean and it’s less expensive — a “droplet” from DigitalOcean (that’s what they call a VPS) is a lot less than ours. You can also then pay monthly (separately) for a cPanel license and then pay someone to install that and then you can have cPanel also.

Upgrades to Nextcloud you could then run yourself, but not just that. You would have to run any and all patches and upgrades to all aspects of your LAMP stack, meaning Linux core upgrades, Apache upgrades, MySQL upgrades, PHP upgrades and other server side software packages as well. Without running those you will expose your server to very serious security issues. Of course, you could instead pay a monthly fee to a third party support team who will do all of that for you, but most of them give fairly low quality service. Others indeed do give good service, but they are very expensive, in particular if you add Nextcloud upgrades.

Then there is the issue of backups as with DigitalOcean you don’t have that and those are vital in the event of a lost file or something breaking. So you can find a third party firm for a reasonable fee and setup a connection for them to backup your server, or pay DigitalOcean an additional fee, but they are more expensive for that then most other firms.

Now you are paying three or four different companies and you are not saving a whole lot of money, with all the expenses put together, and the other issue is that no one party accepts responsibility for any problems so if your server goes down, your support team may say it’s DigitalOcean’s fault and DigitalOcean may say it’s the support team’s problem and then you get stuck in the middle, in particular if the backup server firm says the backup was lost. 🙁

Instead of all that, you have everything you have from us, with one bill and one team. With us you have an extremely stable, and powerful, server that does not go down. You also have a full featured Control Panel including access to 15 full backups of your files and databases. Our Support Team is online 24/7 and they respond to trouble tickets within 5 minutes and we accept full responsibility for the server and the backups and in 12 years of hosting we have never once lost anyone’s backup files. Search on Google and you will find plenty of horror stories of people who’s server died and data that was erased and then the backup files someone got “lost” by their host.

In my opinion if your Nextcloud is important to your business, I would not skimp on the quality of service and backups. The peace of mind, not to mention the quality of the server provided, are worth a few dollars extra.

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