Cloud for friends an family?

Hi guys! New to the forum and just subscribed to Level1Linux on youtube!

I have been thinking of really expand my current network setup.

I have been running a FreeNAS for sometime on a 1000/1000 line, and doing syncing to that machine with rsync. And that works great! So great that friends and family want to ba able to back-up their data.

I have been thinking in terms of security, server and storage. And this all has to be scaleable and easy to manage as a single sysadmin.

I was at first thinking of just setting up a server and manually create shells for each user, so that they can use rsync or use any other syncing application, and with that set a user quota. And with that also have a nextcloud installation for more on the fly clouding. Seems legit to let them have their own shell right?

But how about storage? At first I was thinking to have one server hosting users, and a second server as the storage server. The connection between this, NFS. But that really spun the budget up and hard to configure. Then I heard that there was something called “storage shelf”. That really seemed ti fit my prefs. A case containing storage attached to a backplane, no configuration and very scaleable!

But still. VMs seems nice. Something like a “private digital ocean” running at home. But hard to find open source projects that is matching digital ocean solution. And another con has to be the resources right? Can I run ~50 VMs on xeon e3 1240v5 with 16gb ram? And linux and ZFS? Data integrity has to be top priority if friends and family is trusting me with their data.

So what I’m asking you guys is how to set up a scaleable cloud system, with small efforts of configuration?