So far I have been hosting a few hobby projects on my home server for fun and am really happy with how well everything is working. Running nextcloud, jellyfin, home assistant, a few personal websites, immich and some others each in a separate docker container behind an nginx reverse Proxy, some of them accessible from outside via domain (luckily I managed to get a static IP for free from my ISP), some only internally.

Now in a few months I am maybe going to take over a small bar with a partner and have been looking into ERP/PoS/Inventory management systems and found Odoo which looks really cool. Managed to set it up very quickly via Docker and played around with it. Self-hosting seems to be completely free (unless you need some enterprise apps which I have not yet seen any need for) and open source, while using their service Odoo Online starts at 19.90€/user/month.

However, I am a little unsure about hosting important business infrastructure on a regular, self-maintained home server. I’m thinking in particular about availability, data security, DDoS-protection, back-up plan, OS-updates, etc. Would using a VPS or dedicated server be a better option and solve some of these concerns? Or would you recommend using a managed hosting provider like Odoo Online?

Also wondering if using Odoo in general is overkill for a small bar/kiosk, and if I should look for simpler options, so I’m happy to hear some experiences :)

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    Odoo is probably overkill, but if you need the POS parts then I am not aware of another option with that easily included.

    Odoo itself is a bit of a pain to update across major versions and the (very nice) OCA plugins need to be managend manually. So both factors together make hosting it a bit annoying.

    I don’t see a huge difference in hosting from home or a VPS, but of course a managed solution is going to be more hassle free.

    I think the most important point will be to talk to your business partner about it, and probably to have a backup plan for paper based ordering in place. The latter is good practice anyway, as recent power outages in Spain and Portugal have shown.