Nice setup. I've been meaning to do a similar thing for a year now but only got as far as using bittorrentsync for backing up mobile phones. Will give NextCloud a go soon hopefully.

I bookmarked this page for later reference then archived it once I remembered how fragile this site is.

Great post!

Nice! How long did it take you to set up, all in all?

As a noob I’ve set up my Synology NAS with its integrated cloud solutions, with vpn connection everywhere. Now I’m only needing to increase internet speed, and it’s good to go.

If you look into email hosting with any seriousness you'll see countless stories of people who rejected self-hosting. If their experiences are typical, once you start using your email address for serious purposes your life will be plagued by the double-headed dragon of SPAM and silently failed delivery. If you're lucky you'll get emails bounced back, but you'll always be concerned that incredibly important emails failed to deliver, or the sender was unable to deliver them to you.

Thank you for your overview. Best of luck. I as well am so woven into these people's company, I wish there was an easy alternative. But I guess that is the rub. Want easy, I am ripe for picking. Saving this post for later. I might have just inspired me.

Have you messed with docker? It takes a bit of getting used to, but maintenance is easy when in place.

I am really interested in the cloud storage thing. Replacing Dropbox would be a good thing.

Add ejabberd for chat and SIP signaling and baby you've got a soup going.

Edit: Also, Debian (upon which Ubuntu is based) has a strict policy about only including free and open software in its Repos. They're stable branches are REALLY stable, which means, they're also somewhat old. Testing is sufficiently stable with much more frequent updates.

Edit 2: Note that you can use Google or Amazon cloud storage for your next/owncloud instance; But you can have your data encrypted. Nice to be able to use their storage without revealing anything except how often your server reads and writes to their container. Consider using their cheapest tiers of storage for encrypted backups, as well, a la Duplicity. Or find a few buddies with similar interests (Me, I have no friends) and give each other some space for encrypted backups at your homes/businesses; Then you have off-site backups for free.

Nextnote is being worked on right now (not to be confused with Nextcloud notes). It will have rich text format and sharing the doc for collaboration. So it will be very similar to Google docs. I have looked very hard to find anything with collab sharing features and have no luck. There is collabra suites but from what I've read it breaks a lot.

Also, I'd recommend Nextcloud plus. It was originally Nextcloud pi designed for use with raspberry pis and arm chips. But now it can be used on non arm chips. I like it bc it has many security features built in (fail2ban, mod security, firewall, and others) also has several ddns options built in. Also has auto backup features.

What security do you have on that server? I'd consider port knocking or something similar to hide it from the rest of the planet when it runs that many open services. If you only use it for yourself that shouldn't be too much problem.

change out apache for nginx, its better :)

You host your own SOA for DNS... yeah that's brilliant.

Look into https://www.clearos.com/ - I've been using them for years back when they were called ClarkConnect.