In the land of all the self hosted solutions. What are your best practices / options for business and general admin tasks?

So far we are thinking of setting up a NAS, Paperlessngx for document scanning, FreePBX for phone system, they have accounting software and employee time tracking software. Planning to use nextcloud, running on Proxmox including backups to NAS, with tailscale for 2 people to get in from outside, photoprism for photo storage, portainer.

The goal is a simple, clean, hands off, ways to cut down, centralize the general business work flow. This is a from scratch build and start. All options welcome, the point is to explore ideas. Full production environment for a small business. 1 or 2 office people, 1 to 10 employees. Using a gaming rig mid high end specs which is way overkill for this setup but it might grow depending on this post.

I am looking to FOSS-ify a local business. It’s a service based business, that also does manufacturing which is growing rapidly to overtake the service side it seems this is their goal anyhow.

This is our time to shine! To show how far we have come and what we can now do! An exciting project.

  • theforceofvader@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    The comments seen to be going of in tangents. For a small business self hosted solutions are great, provided you have backups.

    Here’s my 2 cents: Install proxmox or another hypervisor, as it will provide snapshot based auto-backups directly to your NAS nfs share. You may additionally configure an additional vm for testing other things/docker images.

    Also configure your NAS to auto backup to a third location for backup snapshots.

    You may configure additional vms for the accounting and time management software.

    I would recommend separate vms for enterprise/commercial solutions and self hosted ones, as the support for enterprise solutions WILL blame you for anything that goes wong with their software (your XYZ software did abc and broke our product, so no support for you).

    Dedicate 1 VM for self hosted products and as far as possible use docker, as it provides another level of segregation between services. Docker compose would further help you with internal networking and volume management.

    On the docker VM, I would recommend postgres, NGINX Proxy Manager, Uptime Kuma on the same docker network.

    I haven’t had the time to implement LDAP & SSO myself yet but it would ease your life in the long run to set it up at the beginning.

    Good luck.