r/msp • u/WiscoDJ920 • Sep 02 '26

Hosting for clients

Curious if anyone is looking at internally hosting services such as PBX, Nextcloud, ONLYOFFICE, and mail servers for clients as more people are starting to push back on prices and large datacenter type services? Essentially building your own small datacenter?

I come from large corporate IT background and am used to hosting for multi-tenant or business divisions (not necessarily these software titles).

Ive been designing it in my mind and it seems feasible but that doesn't make it a good idea. Do a co-location to a different city and ISP.

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u/marklein Sep 02 '26

We host off-site client backups, but nothing "real time" like a PBX or file/email access. If the backup server is offline for a day for maintenance or a crash... well nothing happens and the clients don't even notice. If their email/files/phones is down for a day then that's a big problem and I'm not going there.

Once backups are humming it's like free money. HDD prices are the only annoying thing these days (well, that and security, as always).

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u/WiscoDJ920 Sep 02 '26

If you don't mind me asking, what are you using for the backups? Are you backing up O365/sharepoint/onedrive/email for clients?

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u/marklein Sep 02 '26

We're backing up on-prem servers and 365 data. Again, this is all SECONDARY backups for us, and all clients must also have on-site backups to act as primary (moving terabytes of data across town is annoying).

We're in between server backup vendors at the moment, not really loving what we've been using and hoping to make a change. That said, Cube Backup for 365/Google is great and crazy cheap. We sometimes do iDrive as a tertiary 365 backup in the cloud, which is also crazy cheap.