Short answer: The server for a Nextcloud installation serving 10 to 30 people costs roughly 5 to 20 euros a month in Germany. That is the smaller part. The larger one is operations: updates, backups, monitoring, restore tests. Skip that part and you save on the server, then pay at the first outage.
Nextcloud itself is open source and carries no licence fee. That is exactly why the calculation is usually cut short: “software free, server ten euros, done.” This article works through the items most comparisons leave out.
What the server actually costs
One rule of thumb: Nextcloud is not CPU-heavy, it is memory- and I/O-heavy. What matters is RAM and disk speed, not core count.
- Up to about 10 active people: 2 cores, 4 GB RAM, SSD.
- Up to about 30 people: 4 cores, 8 GB RAM, SSD.
- Beyond that: separate database and files, or restores get unpleasant.
German providers price such machines in the low double digits per month. Prices change, so there is no table here that will be wrong in six months — check them at the source.
The item that regularly goes missing: storage
The server price usually includes a small system disk. The actual data sits on additional block storage billed per terabyte. Thirty people with 20 GB each is 600 GB — plus headroom, plus versioning, because Nextcloud keeps previous file versions. Budget twice your net requirement.
Backups are not an extra, they are part of the price
A backup on the same machine is not a backup. It has to go somewhere else, encrypted, and it has to be restored regularly — otherwise you do not know whether it works.
In practice: a second location (storage box or object storage), a tool such
as restic or borg, a retention policy, and a date in
the calendar for the restore test. The storage costs a few euros. The date
costs time — and is the item most often dropped.
The biggest item appears in no quote: operating time
Nextcloud ships security updates regularly. Add the operating system, the database, the reverse proxy and TLS certificates. None of it is hard, all of it recurs.
One to two hours a month is realistic for a maintained installation, plus half a day when a major version upgrade is due. Cost those hours at your own rate — then the honest number sits next to the server price.
When self-hosting pays off
- You already have someone looking after servers.
- Your data must not leave the building for legal reasons.
- You need capabilities that get expensive per seat — lots of storage per person, for instance.
- You want to avoid the cost of leaving a closed ecosystem later.
It does not pay off if nobody in-house wants to run it and nobody is paid to. Then a hosted service is the honest answer — or hand operations over.
The hidden cost of a poorly run installation
The most expensive Nextcloud is the one that runs and belongs to nobody. Typical arc: set up by someone who has since moved on; no updates for months; the backup runs but nobody has ever restored from it. The damage does not happen on installation day, it happens two years later.
If you want to master the basics yourself, our server hardening course and the article hardening a Linux server cover the part that is most often missing.
Conclusion
Budget three items, not one: server plus storage, backup target, and operating time. The first two are small and predictable. The third decides whether the installation is still trustworthy after two years.
If you would rather hand operations over: we set up containerised installations with encrypted backups and run them in Germany. A short message is enough for an assessment.