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 :)
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.
I know this comment is a bit old, but do you have any recommendations on how to learn about building custom Odoo modules? I’m an experienced developer (with over 20 years experience) but am new to Odoo. I’ve learnt some things by looking at the code for OCA modules (I had to debug an issue with the Plaid bank statement integration) but am interested in any resources you found useful.
Honestly, my main resources were the CTO at my company, as well as our existing custom modules so if you’re using OCA modules as a reference you’re already on the right path. If you’ve got any specific questions you can ask me, or I can try to think of what the common pitfalls are that I’ve seen that aren’t really well documented.
You can also contract me as a consultant but if you’ve got 20 years of dev experience I’m assuming you aren’t very interested.
Do you have access to the Enterprise codebase? That would also be helpful if you’re running enterprise modules