That is the cheapest option. Maybe the most convenient or most reliable option, but definitely the cheapest.

I am thankful for any input. Maybe it helps someone else looking for a similar thing.

I think the collaborative part means sending PDFs from user to user and maintaining the ability to edit annotations. That may work for many use cases - a lot of businesses may be fine with that when email is still the communication medium of choice.

That’s not an option unfortunately. The actual use case is a non-profit sports club magazine which needs to be proof read by several people at the same time. There is a fixed release date and only a few days to proof read the PDF before it needs to be sent to print.

I have an installation of Stirling PDF, but in my short experiment it had no ability to collaborate on the same document.

Every edit created a new copy of the document downloaded to the user. The annotations weren’t tagged to the individual user and sending different versions of a PDF from user to user is not what I am looking for.

Stirling is a single user software in that regards. I haven’t tested the also mentioned BentoPDF but I suspect it to be the same as it is also trying to be a PDF toolbox like Acrobat. PdfDing has a slightly different approach it might be an option if OnlyOffice does not work out.

I have installed OnlyOffice Community Edition and it seems to work. I need to test it with a few others over a real connection (not just locally), but it seems promising.

I will look into these, do you know if they support collaborative annotations?

You might be right.

Not necessary, no.

I tried that. It opens PDFs in Impress (their PowerPoint) and provides only a very basic annotation interface.

I was wrong. I was using Nextcloud Office not OnlyOffice.

Do you really need that DDoS protection? I have been having my own webserver for decades now hosting public sites and I have only once been in the position that my server was not reachable because of a DDoS attack. And even then the attack was not targeted at my server but at my hosting provider at that time. Everything else was handled by fail2ban easily…

Almost never. I don’t see any benefit .

Gitlab CI/CD pipelines are my go-to tool. At work we self host an instance, for personal projects I use gitlab.com.

That is true for a single person - but in a multiple person household that would mean that everyone needs to carry a copy of their with them. So this mechanism is no replacement for a solid backup of the server somewhere else…

The Bitwarden family plan has been one of the best expenses (if you want to call it that, because it really isn’t that expensive) in our family.

You may want to change the title and include the word “protection”…

The community edition allows me to have multiple sites, multiple users and is way easier to set up. If I ever need additional features like funnels I would need a subscription for both - Plausible is less expensive.

Just a word of warning for everyone: The free self hosted version is heavily limited. I will stick with Plausible which may be simpler but also doesn’t want to push me into a subscription.

The free self hosted version is heavily limited. I will stick with Plausible which may be simpler but also doesn’t want to push me into a subscription.

Everyone has experienced an AWS / Google Cloud / Azure outage or has had a service - you are happy to use switching to (more expensive) subscription service. That’s two things that are not going to happen to self-hosters (except the outage thing, but you can actually do something about it when it happens).

You could use automated testing tools to do the work for you. You define your requirements as individual tests and every input is tested separately giving you a report which tests failed and which succeeded.