How much time?
More than you think.
How much money?
Consult the cheap / fast / reliable chart:
Setting up and maintaining the services is one thing. But as soon as you get actual users and want to offer them a good experience, there’s a lot of additional work: writing guides, answering support mails, announce maintenance downtimes before they happen, etc etc. You can start with an old computer in your basement, but maybe the Internet connection is too bad? Are you aware of and equipped against legal risks etc?
There’s more groups like disroot and I think some are looking for volunteers, maybe help them out to see how stuff works before starting over?
Here’s some of the top of my head (all in or around Germany to my knowledge):
- riseup
- pub.solar
- systemausfall
- systemli
Longer list: Radical Servers
Disroot has an annual report which includes financials. https://disroot.org/en/annual_reports/AnnualReport2024.pdf
In 2024, we received a total of € 31,743.94
from an average of 201 Disrooters each
month. After spending € 23,827.24, VAT
return of € 2301,00 and Interest on
savings of € 263,36 we were able to add
€ 7,252.80 to our general funds.
Our costs in 2024 went towards
infrastructure - € 4078.61
payment fees - € 915.92
office and team supplies - € 313.71
volunteers fees and wages - € 20,820.00
and our donation to FLOSS projects - € 927,00Where do I join them as IT hands?
I want to volunteer and get paid
If you want it done Fast and Good, it will not be done Cheap.
If you want it done Fast and Cheap, it will not be done Good.
If you want it done Good and Cheap, it will not be done Fast.
I’ve got 5 bones and 7 minutes make it work or else get the Gulag treatment
Fast and cheap it is.
Retards like you honestly shouldn’t be on the internet.
You can easily install most of those services on YUNOhost - in fact I have a bunch of them running on a cheap VPS. All open source. It even comes with email and XMPP out of the box. I had no hosting experience beforehand and I rarely have to touch it these days. I would want more resources if I had 10 people using the whole Nextcloud suite every day but if you wanted to go the VPS route I’m sure you could easily do it for less than €5/month/person. You can run it on your own hardware as well.
Yunohost for sure. And start simple. One service
Second that. yunohost is perfect for all in one self hosting solution for small groups. As for hardware requirenments, for 10 peeps you could get away with any VPS (then based on the needs you can check if to upgrade). If you want to self-host on your own hardware most likely a minipc like Hp’s prodesk with 16-32GB RAM would do.
Less than $100 + a subscription to a VPN with port forwarding.
Buy a used Dell Optiplex from Walmart.
Don’t get suckered into buying small form-factor shit like the Pi unless you, you know, need a reason for it to be small.
