is the free SELF-HOSTED option for NPOs managable or just a plain pain in the ass?

[Roni]

 Hello, dear community-members,  

my name's Roni, new here (and instantly coming up with a question).  

First, to begin with, let me thank the people at Atlassian for their offering special conditions to NPOs. Very much appreciated. Good karma!   

Now here comes some background to my search for your recommendations: 

I'm the head of an accredited NPO [Charles-Bukowski-Gesellschaft in Germany].  Had just started the application-process, which went pretty smooth as the system properly recognized our organization to verify our status. 

That's the happy basics so far.  Next I'm developing where my request is rooted to give you the whole picture. 

The offer of a 75%-discount for the CLOUD-plan sure is cool, yet as you all might know, a Non-Profit-Organisation is always short of money, which makes me tending to favour the possibility of the free SELF-HOSTED option.   

Alas, being no expert in the field, I am not quite positive about the implications, the requirements and the overall process of putting this task into work. 

That's where my hope for your expertise comes in: 

Could you please be so kind to shine a light on my ignorance about technicalities, so I can make a proper decision? 

That would not only help my cause tremendously, but also be a true act of human kindness. I Thank You in advance.  Very much.   

  Hold on,  Roni   

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Roni

welcome to the Atlassian Community and to the nonprofit group.

I'm also the chairman of an NPO in Germany (CVJM Walddorfhäslach e.V.) and we do run a Confluence DC instance ourselves. We do this for the exact same reasons you've shared: A 75% discount is generous, but the Atlassian tools would still be too expensive for us, esp. since we have lots of users who are using it only occasionally.

So, how does our setup look like?

• We're using contabo as a cheap provider for the virtual server where we run Confluence on. This costs us currently about 12 Euro per month.
• On this virtual server, we have mainly these components running. All of these components are managed via a docker-compose file so that it's easy to update them after the initial installation.
  • nginx
    A webserver which is mainly responsible for enabling SSL communication.
  • postgres
    The database to use for Confluence.
  • Confluence
    The actual Confluence instance
  • certbot
    A free possibility to get a SSL certificate

Does this sound like a setup you want to maintain somehow? If you want to know more details or need help with the setup, let me know.

Cheers,
Matthias.

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Maybe to add on this and coming back to your initial question if it's manageable or not:

• Most effort was to spin it up initially. I don't upgrade our Confluence to every new version but use Long Term Releases instead.
• With this setup, an upgrade to a new Confluence version is a matter of minutes (if you don't need to update the database, Java runtime or similar).
• A couple of days, our database was corrupt (I don't know why) and I had to spend several hours to restore a backup into a fresh database instance.

-> My takeaway: It's manageable if you're a bit familiar in Linux shells and reading logs. For our setup, knowing docker is probably also kind of a prerequisite.

[Metin Savignano · Accepted solution]

The answer to your question depends greatly on the available technical skills and your available technical environment. I wouldn’t say it’s difficult, but it’s definitely more work to set up everything as with the cloud solution. 

Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss this further, which I’d be happy to do.