So far I have been hosting a few hobby projects on my home server for fun and am really happy with how well everything is working. Running nextcloud, jellyfin, home assistant, a few personal websites, immich and some others each in a separate docker container behind an nginx reverse Proxy, some of them accessible from outside via domain (luckily I managed to get a static IP for free from my ISP), some only internally.
Now in a few months I am maybe going to take over a small bar with a partner and have been looking into ERP/PoS/Inventory management systems and found Odoo which looks really cool. Managed to set it up very quickly via Docker and played around with it. Self-hosting seems to be completely free (unless you need some enterprise apps which I have not yet seen any need for) and open source, while using their service Odoo Online starts at 19.90€/user/month.
However, I am a little unsure about hosting important business infrastructure on a regular, self-maintained home server. I’m thinking in particular about availability, data security, DDoS-protection, back-up plan, OS-updates, etc. Would using a VPS or dedicated server be a better option and solve some of these concerns? Or would you recommend using a managed hosting provider like Odoo Online?
Also wondering if using Odoo in general is overkill for a small bar/kiosk, and if I should look for simpler options, so I’m happy to hear some experiences :)
How much is your time worth? “Free” is the cost of the licensing but you take on the role of IT now (in addition to whatever your role in operating the bar is now). If you’re comfortable with being the IT department (managing the infrastructure, applying updates, running and testing backups, watching security notices, troubleshooting when things go wrong, providing user help desk support) then maybe.
I’m comfortable with all of that - I’d still pay for the license if I were using it for a business.