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 :)

  • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    Its perfectly viable to run your support software on your own hardware (whether local or VPS).

    I do this for myself, as well as for companies sized from 50-5000 (roughly). Larger ones deploy off my specs. The question to me is what is the plan around it. How will backups be handled? What if it goes offline due to a hardware failure? Do you have backups in place? A cold or hot spare? Multiple machines in an HA configuration? Do you need to go to that level if there is an outage?

    I also prefer to make use of solutions with a support model that allows for locally hosted, but has a phone number that can be called. Part of this is because I don’t want to field all these calls, part of it is for the comfort of the client that they have a number they can call (or a dedicated email, whatever, the point is a support contact not how they are contacted), and part of it is to support the project.

    My wife has a (small) business, I have a small business, and I work for a consulting firm (design and engineering). All three make use of on-prem f/loss, all three pay support fees to those projects who do that (and random annual contributions where possible to those that don’t).

    So the short answer is: Figure out your requirements and your disaster recovery scenarios, then figure out what option works best for your needs from there. Cloud, VPS, or internally hosted are all viable, and all come with their own pluses and minuses.