I’m considering using Upwork to find a contract worker to stand up self-hosted Element to use for small business messaging. I have no idea what’s needed, but I feel like using AWS would be cheaper than maintaining a physical server. Is that right? Can anyone help me understand what’s needed?
There are few companies offering matrix hosting, you could check their offers and see if it suits you
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Thanks. I saw that. I figured it would be cheaper to self host. I’ll get pricing though to compare.
Letting someone else, especially a rando on the internet, make a server on your behalf is a huge risk. You are assuming that a competent, non-malicious actor would setup your account correctly and you wanted this very cheaply. What could possibly go wrong?
No its safer to pay the devs that made the product themselves. You get the patch quicker from their paid services and you actually have some sort of guarantee that it will work, because who else knows Element better than the Element devs themselves? The original devs could also make a better job protecting you and you make sure that if you pay the devs, you get updates and security updates as well.
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I would heavily recommend against it.
Element is a total mess and there are major technical bugs that affect use. It is very hard to delete data/rooms, and it is a source of immense frustration for non-technical people.
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Do you recommend something better as a Teams replacement? Preferably open source.
Nothing I can give a personal recommendation for, but if I were trying to set this up for business I would look into MatterMost
Costs savings is a big driver. Mattermost gets expensive at $10/user/month if you want group calling/screen sharing.
What about Nextcloud Talk?
Or RocketChat
Been reading a lot about how talk isn’t ready for production.
Looking into this too. Not free, but not expensive.
Why are you mentioning cost? Both Mattermost and RocketChat can both be self hosted, although I’d lean towards the former.
And imo Mattermost is way more suitable for business use than Element.
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Because with the self hosted version of mattermost you can’t do group calling and screen sharing unless you move up to the $10/user Professional plan.
@M-A9NPV
wow, that is bizarre
For group calls up to 50 concurrent users, Mattermost Enterprise, Professional, or Mattermost Cloud is required.
I would recommend XMPP. It should be easier (easiest?) for self hosting, there are clients with audio/video calling support (if needed) and even hosted solutions should be cheaper than the alternatives. E.g. Conversations offers it at ~6€/year per user
Dang that’s cheap. I need to look into it and the extensions we would need.
What about a calendar? Does anyone know if any of these have a native calendar?