Self-hosted Nextcloud or rented cloud storage?

Self-hosted Nextcloud costs nothing, the way a puppy costs nothing. The software is free. The walks, the vet bills and the monthly updates are yours.

The short answer

Should you self-host Nextcloud or rent cloud storage? Self-host if you want Nextcloud's apps and full control, and you are ready to run updates, backups and restore tests yourself. Rent if you mainly need your files synced and want someone else to be on call. On the prices we could confirm on 25 Oct 2026, about 1 TB of managed Nextcloud costs roughly €306 over five years including VAT [12][19]. A home server with an offsite backup lands between €391 and €634 before you buy any hardware (our calculation, with assumed power draw and BDEW's average electricity price [24]). Money rarely decides this. Time, backup discipline and who you trust do.

How it works

1. Three routes, one question: who is on call? At home, Nextcloud runs on hardware you own, and you do everything. On a VPS (virtual private server, a rented virtual machine) the hardware is rented, but the administration is still yours. With rented storage, somebody else runs it. That is either managed Nextcloud, such as Hetzner Storage Share [12], or a proprietary service such as pCloud [17]. The software is the same on the first two routes. What changes is who patches, who backs up and who could read your files.
2. What “installing” means today. Nextcloud GmbH maintains an all-in-one Docker image, called AIO [1]. A mastercontainer starts and updates the rest: Nextcloud, PostgreSQL, Redis, an Apache proxy with automatic TLS certificates, and optional parts such as Office or Talk [2]. You need Docker, a domain name and, for access from outside, port 443. Other ports than 443 are not supported. If ports 80 and 443 are blocked, AIO's documentation names a built-in deSEC domain or Tailscale as ways out [2]. AIO can also run locally without public access [2]. Nextcloud's manual asks for at least 128 MB of RAM per PHP process and recommends 512 MB [6]. The whole AIO stack needs more. A third-party guide quotes the minimums shown in the AIO interface: 2 GB RAM, a dual-core CPU and 40 GB of system storage with any optional container, 3 GB with ClamAV, Talk Recording or full-text search, and 5 GB with a quad-core CPU for everything, plus 1 GB extra as a recommendation [23]. Check the figures in your own AIO interface.
3. Updates are the real subscription. Nextcloud publishes a new major version about every four months and supports each one for a year with monthly maintenance releases [8]. On 25 Oct 2026 versions 33, 34 and 35 are supported. Version 35 came out on 16 Sep 2026, and version 32 reached its end of life in September 2026 [8]. You cannot skip major versions. Upgrade to the latest point release of your version first, then to the next major one. Downgrading is not supported. The manual wants a fresh backup before every upgrade and third-party apps switched off during it [7]. With AIO, the interface tells admins daily about updates. You stop the containers, update the mastercontainer if needed, then start and update the rest [2]. If you leave an AIO instance alone for six months or more, Nextcloud may no longer start, because the PHP versions inside the container no longer fit [5]. Managed hosting takes this off your plate: Hetzner says it monitors Storage Share instances around the clock and installs the latest updates [12].
4. Backup is a project, not a checkbox. Nextcloud's manual names five things to keep: the config folder, the custom apps folder, the data folder, the theme folder and the database [9]. AIO's built-in backup uses BorgBackup. It covers the database, your files and the configuration, and it skips folders attached through the external-storage app [2]. A backup stops all containers while it runs [4]. Restoring a whole instance on a new AIO needs the archive and its password [2]. A backup on the same disk fails the 3-2-1 rule. AIO accepts a different drive or a remote Borg repository [2]. Hetzner's Storage Box lists BorgBackup among its access methods, and the 1 TB box costs €3.20 per month net [13]. Managed Nextcloud has backups built in: Hetzner makes them several times a day, to another host machine than the one running your instance [12]. Whether you also want a copy outside the provider is your risk call.
5. Who can read your files. On your own server, that is you and everyone with admin access to it. Nextcloud's server-side encryption keeps its keys on the server. In the default master-key mode, admins can decrypt files, and the manual states that it does not protect against a compromised server or a malicious admin. Client-side end-to-end encryption is meant for that case. For local disks, the manual points to disk encryption such as LUKS [10]. On managed hosting, the provider's admins run the server, so the same logic applies to them. That is our reading of the manual, not a statement about Hetzner's practices. pCloud encrypts on its servers by default. Its client-side Crypto folder is sold separately [18][20]. A 2024 paper from ETH Zurich analysed the end-to-end encryption of five providers, pCloud among them, and found severe vulnerabilities in four. Against pCloud it describes attacks such as injecting files and swapping file chunks [11]. The same paper notes that earlier analyses of MEGA and Nextcloud had already shown critical vulnerabilities [11]. Whether pCloud has fixed anything since is unconfirmed. So no route here is magic. Pick the one whose failure you can live with.

What it costs over five years

The scenario: about 1 TB of data, five years, prices as listed on 25 Oct 2026 and assumed to stay the same (they may not). Hetzner lists net prices, so we add the German standard VAT rate of 19 % [19]. Please check VAT and today's price at checkout.

The power rows follow the formula from our energy cost guide: watts × 8,760 hours ÷ 1,000 gives kWh per year. At 10 W that is 87.6 kWh, or €32.41 a year at €0.37 per kWh. At 25 W it is 219 kWh, or €81.03. The wattages are assumptions, not measurements. The price per kWh is the household average that BDEW's analysis of August 2026 reports for 2026 so far, 37.0 ct/kWh [24][25]; use your own tariff. pCloud's pricing page showed three lifetime plans at $219, $499 and $1,499 [17]. The text we could read labels the smallest 500 GB and the largest 10 TB. Macrostack lists the middle one as 2 TB [20], so 2 TB is the smallest plan that fits 1 TB. The page did not show the monthly and yearly prices in a form we could read, so we do not compare them. Hetzner's Storage Box page also has a setup-fee row whose value we could not read: check it before you order [13]. VPS prices and what they leave out. Hetzner lists Cost-Optimized cloud servers from €5.99 per month net, for example the CX23 with 2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM and 40 GB NVMe. It notes that the number of these servers is limited, and the CX23 was marked as not available when we looked [14]. Contabo's Cloud VPS 4 (4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD) showed €4.40 net per month for the first 24 months. The €5.50 "including VAT" on the same page corresponds to a 25 % rate, not the German 19 %; with 19 % it comes to about €5.24 (our calculation). That is €105.60 net for the 24 months. The price after that and the price of extra storage were not readable: unconfirmed [16]. 100 GB is not 1 TB. Hetzner's extra block volumes get no backups or snapshots from Hetzner, and server backups do not include them [15]. A VPS also moves your files to someone else's disk, so the trust question from step 5 stays. What it costs in time. Both numbers here come from parties with something to sell or recommend, so read them with care. Macrostack, a comparison site, budgets about an hour a month [20]. The managed-hosting vendor mein-webserver.de assumes 2 to 4 hours a month [21]. Neither is a measurement. Over 60 months that is 60 to 240 hours. Expect more in the first month. You also need to size the box: one test by getmind.io, with 300 files in a folder, saw a single user get about the same response on one core as on four (276 ms against 266 ms), while eight users at once saw 4,095 ms on one core and 565 ms on four [22]. It is one vendor's single test, so treat it as a hint. For a household, a small machine is plausible. Several people syncing at once need more.

How to decide

Self-hosting fits if most of these are true: you want calendar, contacts or other apps in one place, you have hardware or want to learn, you will test restores, and the data should stay under your roof. Renting fits if most of these are true: nobody wants to be on call, you only need file sync, and a monthly bill is easier to live with than a monthly update. In our assessment, Hetzner's Storage Share is the better fit for plain file storage without admin work, and a Storage Box is a good target for backups. Self-hosting does not have to be all or nothing. You can rent the files and self-host a second Nextcloud for the things you want to learn.

A homelab example

This is how a setup could look. It is an example, not a report on our systems. We make no statement about Nextcloud use in our homelab (as of 25 Oct 2026). We have not run this exact file for this article.

Assume a Linux host with Docker, a Nextcloud reverse proxy in front of it (see Related pages) and a second disk at /mnt/backup. This compose file is adapted from the official one in the AIO repository [3]. The image tag latest is the one that file uses. Compare it with the current file before you start. The proxy settings tell AIO to listen on port 11000 on the loopback address only.

name: nextcloud-aio
services:
  nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer:
    image: ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest
    init: true
    restart: always
    container_name: nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer
    network_mode: bridge
    volumes:
      - nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      APACHE_PORT: 11000
      APACHE_IP_BINDING: 127.0.0.1
volumes:
  nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:
    name: nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer

Start it with docker compose up -d and open the AIO interface on port 8080 with the server's IP address, not a domain name [2]. Enter your domain, start the containers and wait until they run. Then create the backup location: sudo mkdir -p /mnt/backup. Enter /mnt/backup as the backup path in the interface and write down the backup password it shows. Without the archive and that password, a restore on a new server is not possible [2]. Switch on daily backups. Afterwards check the instance from the command line with sudo docker exec --user www-data -it nextcloud-aio-nextcloud php occ status [4].

Now the part people skip. Copy the borg folder from /mnt/backup to a second machine, start a fresh AIO there, and restore from that backup with the password [2]. Open a few files. If it works, you have a backup. If not, you found out on a Sunday afternoon and not on the day the disk died. For the offsite copy, AIO lets you point the backup at a remote Borg repository instead of a local path [2].

Checklist

• Decide who is on call for Nextcloud and how many hours a month that person can give it.
• Measure your data and the number of users, then price the smallest plan that fits.
• Compare net and gross prices, and read today's price and VAT at checkout.
• Place the backup on another disk or machine than the data, and add one copy outside the building or the provider.
• Save the AIO backup password and your domain notes somewhere outside the server.
• Restore a backup on a second machine before you move real data, and repeat it every quarter.
• Update every month, never skip a major version, and back up before each upgrade.
• Choose who may read your files, and read the analysis of any client-side encryption before you trust it with secrets.
• Keep your exit open: let a sync client hold a local copy and export your files on a schedule.
• Close every port you do not use, expose only 443 or reach Nextcloud through a VPN such as Tailscale [2].