How much time and money would it take to set up and maintain a server similar to disroot.org, offering the same services, for a group of ten people?
How much time?
More than you think.
How much money?
Consult the cheap / fast / reliable chart:
Setting up and maintaining the services is one thing. But as soon as you get actual users and want to offer them a good experience, there's a lot of additional work: writing guides, answering support mails, announce maintenance downtimes before they happen, etc etc. You can start with an old computer in your basement, but maybe the Internet connection is too bad? Are you aware of and equipped against legal risks etc?
There's more groups like disroot and I think some are looking for volunteers, maybe help them out to see how stuff works before starting over?
Here's some of the top of my head (all in or around Germany to my knowledge):
Longer list: Radical Servers
If you want it done Fast and Good, it will not be done Cheap.
If you want it done Fast and Cheap, it will not be done Good.
If you want it done Good and Cheap, it will not be done Fast.
I've got 5 bones and 7 minutes make it work or else get the Gulag treatment
Fast and cheap it is.
Retards like you honestly shouldn't be on the internet.
Disroot has an annual report which includes financials. https://disroot.org/en/annual_reports/AnnualReport2024.pdf
In 2024, we received a total of € 31,743.94
from an average of 201 Disrooters each
month. After spending € 23,827.24, VAT
return of € 2301,00 and Interest on
savings of € 263,36 we were able to add
€ 7,252.80 to our general funds.
Our costs in 2024 went towards
infrastructure - € 4078.61
payment fees - € 915.92
office and team supplies - € 313.71
volunteers fees and wages - € 20,820.00
and our donation to FLOSS projects - € 927,00
Some of those services are pretty easy to set up, some might be more complicated. You’d have to look around for open source projects for those services and see if you can find ones you like. It will take more time to get it initially set up than to maintain, but expect to fix something that breaks every once in a while.
As for cost, probably like a few hundred to a thousand USD can get a reasonable computer for this. You don’t need a GPU, but want a decent CPU, plenty of RAM, and a LOT of storage. Look for companies auctioning off old servers.
Loosely I’d say expect this project to be a whole hobby.
Looks like most of their services are also foss. Says their cloud service is powered by nextcloud, and pad is powered by Etherpad, upload by Lufi, etc. So, OP could probably just self-host most of these really easily. Hardest one would probably be email. That's a whole 'nother beast for most. Especially since most residential IPs are blacklisted. You almoat always need to cloud-host that.
My cloud-hosting knowledge is a bit dated, bit I bet there are webhosting places that do the email bit for you, you juat pay the monthly fee to use their auto-gen instance of mailcow or whatever.
I mean, Email is twofold. Like running the server and getting inbound email: just as easy as all the other services.
Outbound? That shit can be difficult, near impossible on residential. But as outbound mail is kinda "lost" anyway in a privacy sense, I would not feel too bad about using a relay.
For email, you just pay for a host that will let you use your own domain. It's usually a lot cheaper than getting a static IP and you can easily switch hosts while keeping your email address.
It's not really even worth attempting to self host your own outbound email these days. It's a lot of work getting the big email providers to accept your email and if someone has ever sent spam from your IP address, you are pretty much screwed.
You can easily install most of those services on YUNOhost - in fact I have a bunch of them running on a cheap VPS. All open source. It even comes with email and XMPP out of the box. I had no hosting experience beforehand and I rarely have to touch it these days. I would want more resources if I had 10 people using the whole Nextcloud suite every day but if you wanted to go the VPS route I'm sure you could easily do it for less than €5/month/person. You can run it on your own hardware as well.
Yunohost for sure. And start simple. One service
Came here to say pretty much the same thing. I basically already host "disroot" services for myself.
Less than $100 + a subscription to a VPN with port forwarding.
Buy a used Dell Optiplex from Walmart.
Don't get suckered into buying small form-factor shit like the Pi unless you, you know, need a reason for it to be small.
This project should be significantly easier to for folks if you add claude code to your stack. cc is an excellent admin, and server manager.
That sounds like spam. I'll report just in case.
https://git.selfprivacy.org/SelfPrivacy/selfprivacy.org.app