Selfhosted
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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Not sure what sort of uptime/reliability your friends are expecting out of a self hosted solution but for something like that you wouldn't need much processing power, even a Raspberry Pi can host a simple website. Not sure what to recommend offhand but there are definitely vendors in that space that sell simple DIY "contact us" form software, or I guess if you wanted to roll your own that's an option too. I'd be more concerned about keeping it locked down/secure.
Keep in mind for the internet your friends would likely need business class internet with multiple static IPs so you can give your little DIY box its own public IP address. Many (most?) residential internet service providers do not allow self hosting websites on their network and they'd be dynamic IP anyway though you could work around that somewhat with dynamic DNS since you're going to need to purchase a domain name and point it to somewhere anyway.
Like others said you really don't want to go that route unless you're well versed in that area. It would be annoying for a business especially a new one, those emails will likely keep going into other provider's spam folders for a good period of time. All the big mainstream email providers are notorious for not trusting new email domains / new IP addresses.
Seems easier to just go to Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / whatever other provider you like to use, presumably the business has a business use case for reliable email among other things.
Bonus: Those cloud services can easily host simple contact forms for you so maybe that's your all in one solution. Look into Google Forms and similar.
That sounds like the above commercial cloud solutions again :)
But sure technically you could go through the extra step hosting that yourself. Depends on how the business wants to use/access this stuff, it's really a question for them. Could be as simple as a Windows server with RDP (if they're Windows people & just want to log into something "windows" to browse/open files) or maybe multi-user Linux with VNC (the geeks might like, maybe not so much the general Windows/Mac users). Or if you're trying to do something web oriented maybe something like Nextcloud if you want to do all this in a web browser.
You should triple check what exactly they are expecting when it comes to remote access documents... you really don't want to spend the time setting up something that they totally weren't expecting and end up hating.
That's what I already do.
cloudflare-ddns, own domain and done. Except for reliability at night where the ISP reboots my DSL connection at 4am.
Thanks.
I dont think website uptime is a vital issue since it is basically just advertising, catalogue, and then links to their emails and phone numbers but it wont handle any type of sales or orders and I think its the only part that they can realistically self-host. Im aware of the static IP and bandwith issues, still, we have to look into the costs of that.
For the rest, Im looking into comercial options right now. Whats your opinion on proton for e-mail? (If you have any)