from Drukob@feddit.org to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 26 Aug 12:07
https://feddit.org/post/17918687
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 :)
threaded - newest
Odoo is probably overkill, but if you need the POS parts then I am not aware of another option with that easily included.
Odoo itself is a bit of a pain to update across major versions and the (very nice) OCA plugins need to be managend manually. So both factors together make hosting it a bit annoying.
I don’t see a huge difference in hosting from home or a VPS, but of course a managed solution is going to be more hassle free.
I think the most important point will be to talk to your business partner about it, and probably to have a backup plan for paper based ordering in place. The latter is good practice anyway, as recent power outages in Spain and Portugal have shown.
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.
If you’re using open source software for business you should pay the licence if you can $20 a month isnt a huge ask for enterprise software.
As for self hosting, just try it for a few weeks. Make sure you’re backing up important stuff to the cloud backblaze is dirt cheap. If its to much work you can switch to a saas solution.
Source: Odoo admin and consultant I’d 100% go with a VPS. You can check out cloudpepper for a nice hosting platform, it’s a management layer over your own VPS that just simplifies a lot of things ( addon management, installation, etc) If you ever plan to grow even the slightest, you’ll find Odoo online restrictive as no third-party modules can be installed. No custom Python code either. If you are serious about ERP, talk to a local partner. Try to find one that has experience with your activity sector and don’t get fooled by the partner level (learning, ready, silver, gold). These are based on # of entreprise licences sold by that partner (and also # of certified employees, but that’s secondary). A smaller partner with retail experience will be better for you.
Feel free to DM me questions you have, I’m happy to share my experience!
Its perfectly viable to run your support software on your own hardware (whether local or VPS).
I do this for myself, as well as for companies sized from 50-5000 (roughly). Larger ones deploy off my specs. The question to me is what is the plan around it. How will backups be handled? What if it goes offline due to a hardware failure? Do you have backups in place? A cold or hot spare? Multiple machines in an HA configuration? Do you need to go to that level if there is an outage?
I also prefer to make use of solutions with a support model that allows for locally hosted, but has a phone number that can be called. Part of this is because I don’t want to field all these calls, part of it is for the comfort of the client that they have a number they can call (or a dedicated email, whatever, the point is a support contact not how they are contacted), and part of it is to support the project.
My wife has a (small) business, I have a small business, and I work for a consulting firm (design and engineering). All three make use of on-prem f/loss, all three pay support fees to those projects who do that (and random annual contributions where possible to those that don’t).
So the short answer is: Figure out your requirements and your disaster recovery scenarios, then figure out what option works best for your needs from there. Cloud, VPS, or internally hosted are all viable, and all come with their own pluses and minuses.
We use Odoo, but I can’t coomment on how it would suit you running a bar. But wanted to mention if you a need a very simple shift organizer (not self hosted) for employees Float is super easy to fill in and float shifts on the calendar. Odoo has some tools but I found it clunky for arranging the achedules
I do recommend self hosting actually, if you’ve got the chops.
Odoo online doesn’t allow custom modules and odoo.sh hosting is pretty expensive. Think aws prices quadrupled.
I would however not recommend running it on a home server if it’s business critical. Run it on something where you can easily recover from hardware failure, etc.
And as I tell everyone, if you need customizations, I charge reasonable rates and can invoice from a company. But custom modules can make future upgrades more difficult.