A VPS with a wireguard-based VPN an syncthing seems nice.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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Obviously, everyone will recommend Nextcloud. And yes, it works. But it is heavy and can feel slow.
I then moved to OwnCloud, the original project behind Nextcloud, which I found significantly faster. After that, I switched to OpenCloud, which is closely related to OwnCloud. It is less intuitive to set up, but it is extremely lightweight and very fast. That is the one I recommend.
Depending on your use case, there are plenty of other options as well, such as Seafile, Filerun, Filestash, Copyparty, and others.
It is less intuitive to set up, but it is extremely lightweight and very fast. That is the one I recommend.
I highly question the decision process to only include the lightweight and speed. There are much more important criterias to consider, like for example stability, maintainability, support etc.
I do not need yet another service that gets abonded 1-2 years after launch or goes subscription only etc.
Fair point, stability and long term maintenance absolutely matter.
I was mainly highlighting performance because that is often the main friction people, including me, report with Nextcloud for simple setups.
OpenCloud is not a random new project either, it comes out of the ownCloud ecosystem, so there is some history and structure behind it.
If you have specific alternatives you consider stronger in terms of governance or long term stability, I would be interested to hear them. It would help broaden the list of solid open source alternatives.
While lots of ppl will hate on Nextcloud, its pretty good. When you do the setup right, with cache and so on set up it's fast and serves its purpose not only as cloud storage but as a collaboration platform where you can edit files with other ppl and much more.
If you only want a simple Web App to up and download files there are probably other solutions for that.
I think there are a couple for documents, crypt pad is one, and there is another that's like a french based company I can't remember the name of. Also murena.io I believe can offer an entire suite of cloud options.
I've been self-hosting NextCloud and it is pretty good, a little bit slow sometimes and some problems hosting it in non 443 ports, but overral i am liking it
Mainly just Nextcloud. I have it setup pretty lean as most of it's capabilities is just massive overkill for my needs. I mostly just have it handling file, calendar and contact syncing as well as it's news reader.
I've largely ignored most of Proton's offerings as it feels like they are trying to become Google 2.0. I lived through that once, that was enough. When Proton started they were very much "Don't know who you are and don't want to". Now I'm not so sure what their ambitions are. Creepy vibes from them lately that remind me of Google.
I mostly just have it handling file,
I needed something for storing important documents and installed nextcloud. After adding a single file I was reminded of just how much I hate SharePoint and removed it again.
What benefit do you get from storing files in nextcloud over just using a file system directly?