A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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If you're having issues with NextCloud being slow and having errors, it's probably because the machine you are running it on is low on RAM and/or CPU.
I bring this up because what ever replacements you try would likely have the same issues.
My NextCloud instance was nearly unusable when I had it on a Raspberry PI 3, but when I moved it to a container on my faster machine (AMD Ryzen 7 4800U with 16GB of ram) it now works flawlessly.
The backing database type and the storage it runs on are just as important too.
I agree with this. It needs a good amount of CPU cycle and RAM. Raspi struggled for me too.
My NC instance runs on a 24GB RAM, 4 CPU Ampere A1 host(Oracle), and still struggles. YMMV.
And it struggles as a photo backup host an i5-7xxx and 16GB RAM at home.
It's not absurdly slow, it's just...irritating sometimes.
Whta db are you using
Postgres.
Also using redis, did all the typical perf checks listed on NC site etc.
Yeah, Ive got this in my setup as well and its been pretty slow. I thought it was a network thing because I'm currently using Tmobile home internet but switching to a fiber optic network with 500Mbps up and down soon. Im really hoping that changes things
Sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. I've been running the lsio Nextcloud docker container for 4 years without any issues at all.
What exactly have you tried to do to address your nextCloud problems?
I have my issues with Nextcloud, but it's still, by far, the best solution I've come across.
I was on the same boat when I was running NC on a container. I switched to VM, and most of my issues have been resolved, but collabora. I am currently using the built-in collabora server, which is slow.
Same and looking forward to the responses here. Nextcloud is too big and complicated. I deployed Immich to cover for the photo library. Still looking for a good solution for notes though.
Files: Filerun or File Browser both allow upload and download. I prefer the former as it allows me to preview file contents more broadly (e.g. pictures and videos). But it is paid.
Calendar: DecSync or Radicale both have no web UI. I prefer the former because it doesn't need a server at all, just a file sync solution. But, if you have an iPhone there are no clients and you'd have to setup a radicale server anyway.
Notes: Like others have said, Obsidian with Obsidian-livesync.
The nice thing about Filerun/DecSync/Obsidian is they store or serve files in close to their original format (e.g. files/xml/plaintext), so you can still open the file up on any computer and read its contents the way you normally would.
I used Nextcloud + Samba by the side for awhile, these days I use Samba exclusively, mounting takes basically no time whatsoever and syncthing for synchronization stuff
I open source my homelab as much as I can. But when it comes to backups of my family's photos, servers, and laptops I don't want troubleshoot bugs that could cost me valuable data and time; that's why I gladly pay for a Synology NAS.
I use linuxserver.io's nextcloud docker image. While I've seen people struggle to setup Nextcloud properly to the point of just giving and installing the snap version of it, I can count the number of times I've needed to do manual interventions for nextcloud with LSIO's nextcloud image. It works like a charm.
lSIO is amazing, my first stop for container browsing! Followed in second place by hotio.dev
Second this. Running on portsinet with the images. Absolutely breeze with 8gb ram and 2tb ssd
I just installed it baremetal, works like a charm.
Take a look at Cloudreve
This is concerning to me because I’ve been considering ditching Synology and spinning up nextcloud. I like Synology drive but I’m tired of the underpowered hardware and dumb roadblocks and vendor lock-in nonsense. I’m very curious what you end up doing!
Not OP, but I run it on docker with postgres and redis, behind a reverse proxy. All apps on NC have pretty good performance and haven't had any weird issues. It's on an old xeon with 32gb and on spinning rust.
Next cloud must be the worst piece of shit ever
I never stop seeing people complain about it :(
It sounds like the sync aspect was written by the crash plan folks.
This is where I am right now as well. The main thing (or really the only thing in fact) I use nextcloud for now is file storage, because when it works, it works damn well. I only really need something that can upload and download files easily, which I guess there are alternative for that, but I also need to be able to share the files via link and share links where other people can upload files for me, which so far Nextcloud does the best of the bunch I've tried... So I'm kinda stuck on the decision to switch for now...
Notes: Memos
Calendar: still Nextcloud (caldav is fast enough in nextcloud, even with sqlite) or SOGo
Files: Owncloud OCIS (not the old PHP one)
You have not stated the hardware you are running this on. It makes a huge difference. Hope this is not Raspi?
NC on RPi 4 with 8 GB RAM works fine for me. The RPi 3 turned out to be lacking sufficient amount of RAM (1GB) after a NC version update.
Did you switch Nextcloud from SQLite to another database?
Other than that, chances are, whatever makes your Nextcloud install slow will also affect Seafile or whatever else you replace it with.
I spent some time with top and iotop debugging my server performance problems. I found an issue that was completely unrelated to Nextcloud. Since I fixed it my Nextcloud instance has been completely reliable.
I looked into Seafile as well but disliked that it stores my files in some weird block format.
I use pydio for cloud drive. I think you can try this
PSA: saying "I run Nextcloud and don't have any problems" doesn't help anyone or contribute anything useful to the conversation. It just makes you look like an insecure fanboy.
Disagree, seeing as OP has not posted anything other than "I run Nextcloud and have problems", providing a counter is straightforward and expected.
The OP is exactly the same but in reverse. I haven't had any issues but using MariaDB instead of default SQL.
No, it makes you look insecure about your objectivity. Spreading FUD about a FOSS project isn't helpful, and it's usually down to misconfiguration or poor hardware that it doesn't run properly.
I see plenty of folks who think they've got Redis setup but are following crap guides, so it isn't working.
For Calendar I highly recommend radicale. Super easy to setup and has a non bloated management ui. Has worked flawlessly over the last years
Me as well I don’t like nextcloud at all
Need something like synology drive but open source
Give Radicale a try for CalDAV and CardDAV.
+1 for radicale. Simple setup, reliable, easy to administer and backup.
Perhaps you need something to trigger the webcron so things don’t slow down to a crawl. I use uptime Kuma to trigger the webcron every five minutes and have never had any issues.
Did you tried installing it with snap?
Its just snap install nextcloud and you are done. No config no manual updates and iam having a good time with it. It was a bit tricky to change the main storage folder to another hdd, but its possible.
That maybe fix your Performance issues too if there is something configured wrong, in the other hand snap is a bit slower then a normal install.
Trillium , file browser
If you are willing to consider commercial products, I can recommend Synology DiskStations (at least the plus series). Samba shares are quite easy to setup, you can use Synology Drive to sync a folder between workstations and Android phones which I use for Obsidian for note taking. They also have calendar options, but I use a hosted account at posteo for that.
If you want to stick to nextcloud but don't want to host it, you could consider Hetzner Storage Share. It's fully managed and worked great for me so far. But I only use it to share photos with others, so not all features.
Sorge Hetzner Storage Share is what I now use as a "rock solid" Nextcloud. It's slow as fuck since I activated like all plugins but - hypothetically they let you run those small llms for a Local AI integration meaning you could do a lot for those few bucks.
However, long term, I having setup Nextcloud AIO and so far I did one upgrade without any issues. This Nextcloud could be fast - but is not slow running on 150gb RAM and 6 vCPUs. It would take more RAM if I give it more......but I have a full stack NC with Talk,ClamAV, Talk Record, .....
I like the look of filerun - but it's not free in the community edition anymore. So what I am looking into for a time but could not figure to setup is Pydio.
Sadly there is no real alternative right now if you want anything close to what the cloud providers do. Synthing is the only thing I use that comes close to parts of it. Nextcloud is just a slow insecure mess.
Owncloud.
I personally never caught the Nextcloud hype, and stuck with the original. So far I've heard (and seen, having tried it twoce) nothing but trouble from Nextcloud while my Owncloud install continues to be rock solid for going on 10 years (regularly updated, of course!).
Same. I ran OwnCloud and Nextcloud in parallel for a while until a Nextcloud update nuked it and my wife lost some of her college work.
After that I've appreciated the slower more deliberate pace of OwnCloud
Dunno, running my nextcloud for a long time now, even updating the lazy way over the web UI and not the suggested CLI, not even once had a problem that was Nextclouds fault.
I always recommend OwnCloud. It even has a raw photo viewer plugin and if you know anything about RAW 24 megapixel photos, they are tough to load. But with owncloud a folder full of 30 pictures loads within 10-15 seconds
Synology Drive is rock solid. Not open source though if that's important to you and technically requires Synology hardware.