In the land of all the self hosted solutions. What are your best practices / options for business and general admin tasks?
So far we are thinking of setting up a NAS, Paperlessngx for document scanning, FreePBX for phone system, they have accounting software and employee time tracking software. Planning to use nextcloud, running on Proxmox including backups to NAS, with tailscale for 2 people to get in from outside, photoprism for photo storage, portainer.
The goal is a simple, clean, hands off, ways to cut down, centralize the general business work flow. This is a from scratch build and start. All options welcome, the point is to explore ideas. Full production environment for a small business. 1 or 2 office people, 1 to 10 employees. Using a gaming rig mid high end specs which is way overkill for this setup but it might grow depending on this post.
I am looking to FOSS-ify a local business. It’s a service based business, that also does manufacturing which is growing rapidly to overtake the service side it seems this is their goal anyhow.
This is our time to shine! To show how far we have come and what we can now do! An exciting project.
Is there a reason you aren’t using standard enterprise stuff?
I think you will quickly find that a lot of those pieces of software aren’t scalable
If the business grows tenfold, it’s still only 120 people. They can’t handle that in a gaming rig?
Depends on the workload, really. 120 users using small services? probably. 120 users sharing large files or bandwidth heavy stuff? Doubt it. Also a lot of enterprise hardware is about reliability. Multiple PSUs, NICs, more robust hardware for constant load/network traffic, etc.
Sure, a gaming rig can handle it until it can’t. Another question is what happens when the box crashes? Is the business down until a new PC is built and restored from backups?
A small business can probably afford two PCs, but scaling up and up eventually becomes a lot of trouble and space.