I’ve been looking at alternatives to Google Workspace / Office 365 for SME / non-profits.

Broadly I have been searching for something that allows an organisation to use their own domain, includes email and nextcloud hosting and a mechanism to manage users/email addresses for the organisation.

In my ideal solution alongside an email server we would have access to a cloud hosted LDAP server/instance to manage users passwords and permissions and then administrators would be able to spin up instances of applications such as Nextcloud, Wordpress, CiviCRM and other Open source applications as a service.

I used the list of Hosting Providers on the Nexcloud website alongside the following list I found - https://github.com/thetuxinator/nextcloud_providers?tab=readme-ov-file

As yet we haven’t made any decisions but created a shortlist of providers to consider: These include:

https://cloud68.co/managed-hosting/nextcloud https://www.stackhero.io/en/services/Nextcloud/pricing https://cloud.ionos.co.uk/solutions/nextcloud#packages https://www.commonscloud.coop/advanced-office/ https://www.federated.computer/pricing/ https://brixly.uk/email-hosting-with-nextcloud-

None of these seem perfect (I suspect that plenty of have some proprietary components in there (their own User provisioning and billing components )

I’m not sure any of these are perfect. I’ve also been looking at https://docs.coopcloud.tech/intro/strategy/ which appears to be aiming to provide mechanism to deliver such services for organisations on top of Baremetal / Cloud Compute and Storage. (Though this doesn’t appear to include email and LDAP at the moment) I can see these would be natural extensions.

I’m also looking to see to what degree this could be achieved using Web Hosting Services (Cpanel now supports creating sub-users that can be configured to access to email, ftp and web storage but I am not sure whether their credentials can be used for single signon for Web Applications running on your account such as WordPress and NextCloud. I need to look at the other major WebHosting Provisioning systems such as ( I think Plesk is one)