A Google Drive alternative your business actually owns: hosted Nextcloud, without a per-seat bill

Per-seat pricing is the quietest cost increase in a small business. You start with three people on a file-sharing plan, you hire a fourth, and the bill goes up — not because anyone is storing more, but because there is one more login. Then a contractor needs access for six weeks, and sharing a folder with someone outside the company costs another seat, or does not work at all.

If you have gone looking for a Google Drive alternative for business, you have probably already found Nextcloud. It does files, sync clients for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, share links with passwords and expiry, versioning, and — the part people miss — the calendar and contacts your mail clients can subscribe to. Every one of those is per-server, not per-person.

The thing that makes self-hosting fail

Nextcloud has a reputation for being fiddly, and the reputation is earned — but not for the reason people assume. The install is not hard. What is hard is the set of small, invisible requirements that make it behave like a product rather than a demo:

• It needs PostgreSQL, not the MySQL that most control panels install by default and then hand you with nothing connected to it.
• It needs the upload path opened up. A default reverse proxy caps request bodies at 1 MB and times out after a minute. Uploading the file that actually matters — the 3 GB design archive, the video the client sent — fails.
• It needs four specific discovery redirects for CalDAV, CardDAV and WebFinger. Without them Nextcloud shows a permanent setup warning in the admin panel and desktop client auto-configuration silently does not work.
• It needs its data somewhere durable. If the files live on the server's boot disk, then rebuilding the server is the same event as losing the files.

None of that is difficult. All of it is the kind of thing you discover one item at a time, usually while somebody is waiting for a file.

How we deploy it

Nextcloud is one of the Platforms in the catalogue — a complete product we install whole rather than an app you assemble. Pick it, pick a server with a block volume, name a domain, and the rest is ours:

• PostgreSQL comes bundled as part of a multi-container deployment with startup ordering and health gates. You are not asked to provision a database first.
• The vhost is built for file transfer — no request body cap at all, buffering off, hour-long timeouts, WebSocket upgrade headers — and the CalDAV, CardDAV and WebFinger redirects are written in, so the setup warning never appears.
• Files land on block storage at a uniform path, so a server rebuild is an inconvenience rather than an incident. Removing the platform keeps the data; deleting it is a separate, explicit action.
• The certificate is issued and renewed automatically, and the renewal preserves the upload-friendly proxy configuration instead of overwriting it with a generic one.
• The admin credentials are minted into your secrets vault and revealed on demand, not printed into a log.

Everything deployed shows up on one account-level Platforms page — every instance across every server you own, with its domain, certificate state, library size and status. The question customers ask is "where are my files", not "what is installed on machine four", so that is the question the page answers.

When you do not need Nextcloud

Nextcloud is a lot of product. If what you want is a folder on a server that a few people can browse, upload to and share links from, the catalogue also has File Browser — a web file manager with share links, no database, and a much smaller memory floor. And if the people who need access are comfortable with a file transfer client, every server already gives you SFTP over port 22 without deploying anything at all.

Pick the smallest of the three that solves the problem. We would rather you ran File Browser on a small machine than Nextcloud on one that cannot carry it.

The cost comparison that actually matters

A per-seat plan is priced on how many people you employ. A server is priced on how much disk and memory you use. Those two lines diverge the moment you grow, and they diverge again every time you need to give someone temporary access.

With us you pay the cloud provider's price for the machine and volume, plus our markup — which is the dashboard fee, is the only thing we charge, and does not change with the region. Adding your tenth user costs nothing. Adding your fiftieth costs nothing. Adding 200 GB costs what 200 GB costs.

If your data has to stay in a particular country because a client contract says so, that is a region choice at order time rather than an enterprise tier — and it takes about a minute to decide.

The short version

Owning your files is not really a technical decision. It is a decision about whether the cost of storing your own documents should scale with your headcount. Self-hosting used to mean trading that bill for a weekend of configuration and a permanent low-level worry about the server.

Removing that trade is the whole point of the platform. Create your account, order a file server, and deploy Nextcloud from the catalogue.