Nextcloud - how to get started?

Hi, long story short I do not want to use services from Google, Microsoft or Dropbox. I’ve heard a lot of good things about nextcloud, plus it seems to have good integration with Linux OSes. I’m not quite sure how to get started with it though, there seem to be a lot of different hostings for it and it’s difficult to choose one that I could be safe with. i do not want to self host on a VPS because it’s just a lot of work and I have no experience with nc. I guess the most important thing I’m looking for is a hosting recommendation. Also, I’m looking for some tips on getting started.

If you’re not going to self host it’s like giving away data, but to a different company than Google, Microsoft or Dropbox.
But, if you’re really set on getting a Nextcloud istance off of your network, the best service, as far as I know, is offered by Linode. It’s not cheap but it will surely work great.

Still my suggestion is to get a machine to self host Nextcloud if you want to be in total control of your data. Maybe a cheap R3 1200, some ECC memory and new HDDs. Depending on the use you’ll make of this machine it may pay off on the long run.

Self hosting is the way to go. VPS data is expensive and you won’t get much more out of a DO droplet then what Google gives you for free…and you’ll be paying for it.

To get started you’ll want to pick out where/how you want to host. I’m not going to recommend any service in particular because they are all mostly the same just locations change. You’ll want one that’s located closer to you because it’s less likely to have bandwidth issues causing it to not saturate your connection.

Then you’ll need to pick an OS. Ubuntu is probably a wise choice if you are starting out in Linux but I’ll leave that up to you.

Then you follow the install procedure which is well documented.