Been looking into this myself recently. I'm currently trying out a free 5GB account from an online provider and like it better than Dropbox. So I'm sold on the whole idea of Nextcloud.

Haven't decided what deployment method to use yet. I considered the pre-made VM images but will probably use one of the containers because it seems easier to deploy a proper HTTPS certificate with the Let's Encrypt nginx container in front. All on Podman, there are heaps of tutorials around.

I have a couple of decent mini PCs I'll use, you can get them cheap on eBay. I've heard it struggles on a little Raspberry Pi if you have many systems doing sync (which is exactly what I want to do).