Selfhosted

Setting up and maintaining the services is one thing. But as soon as you get actual users and want to offer them a good experience, there's a lot of additional work: writing guides, answering support mails, announce maintenance downtimes before they happen, etc etc. You can start with an old computer in your basement, but maybe the Internet connection is too bad? Are you aware of and equipped against legal risks etc?

There's more groups like disroot and I think some are looking for volunteers, maybe help them out to see how stuff works before starting over?

Here's some of the top of my head (all in or around Germany to my knowledge):

• riseup
• pub.solar
• systemausfall
• systemli

Longer list: Radical Servers

Less than $100 + a subscription to a VPN with port forwarding.

Buy a used Dell Optiplex from Walmart.

Don't get suckered into buying small form-factor shit like the Pi unless you, you know, need a reason for it to be small.

If you want it done Fast and Good, it will not be done Cheap.

If you want it done Fast and Cheap, it will not be done Good.

If you want it done Good and Cheap, it will not be done Fast.

Disroot has an annual report which includes financials. https://disroot.org/en/annual_reports/AnnualReport2024.pdf

In 2024, we received a total of € 31,743.94
from an average of 201 Disrooters each
month. After spending € 23,827.24, VAT
return of € 2301,00 and Interest on
savings of € 263,36 we were able to add
€ 7,252.80 to our general funds.
Our costs in 2024 went towards
infrastructure - € 4078.61
payment fees - € 915.92
office and team supplies - € 313.71
volunteers fees and wages - € 20,820.00
and our donation to FLOSS projects - € 927,00

For most of those services, you’re looking at a few days to assemble and set up a server. For email, plan to spend the next month learning and troubleshooting.

You can run all of that on basically any computer. If you have an old desktop, that would work great.

Email often isn’t possible to self host because many ISPs block outbound connections on port 25. But, you can host it on some VPS providers, like DigitalOcean. The IP they give you will almost certainly have a terrible reputation and result in a lot of your mail going into people’s spam folders. So, you’ll have to spend some time contacting IP blacklist providers.

Another option is to host the inbound SMTP servers, and handle outbound through a relay server. I’m not gonna recommend any, because I’m not too familiar with them.

I know a fair bit about running email services, because I created and run https://port87.com/, a fairly new email service. I had to learn a lot about email to build it.

Some of those services are pretty easy to set up, some might be more complicated. You’d have to look around for open source projects for those services and see if you can find ones you like. It will take more time to get it initially set up than to maintain, but expect to fix something that breaks every once in a while.

As for cost, probably like a few hundred to a thousand USD can get a reasonable computer for this. You don’t need a GPU, but want a decent CPU, plenty of RAM, and a LOT of storage. Look for companies auctioning off old servers.

Loosely I’d say expect this project to be a whole hobby.

You can easily install most of those services on YUNOhost - in fact I have a bunch of them running on a cheap VPS. All open source. It even comes with email and XMPP out of the box. I had no hosting experience beforehand and I rarely have to touch it these days. I would want more resources if I had 10 people using the whole Nextcloud suite every day but if you wanted to go the VPS route I'm sure you could easily do it for less than €5/month/person. You can run it on your own hardware as well.