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 :)

  • boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    I do recommend self hosting actually, if you’ve got the chops.

    Odoo online doesn’t allow custom modules and odoo.sh hosting is pretty expensive. Think aws prices quadrupled.

    I would however not recommend running it on a home server if it’s business critical. Run it on something where you can easily recover from hardware failure, etc.

    And as I tell everyone, if you need customizations, I charge reasonable rates and can invoice from a company. But custom modules can make future upgrades more difficult.