Self-Hosted Cloud Storage on a No-KYC VPS: Nextcloud Sizing, Storage Limits and Real Costs

If you want your files off Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud, a VPS running Nextcloud is the most realistic self-hosted replacement — and a no-KYC VPS adds the part the commercial clouds can't: no name, email or payment card attached to the account holding your data. The short version: a 2 vCPU / 4 GB plan comfortably runs a personal or small-team Nextcloud, and the real constraint isn't CPU, it's disk. VPS NVMe is fast but small, so plan your storage strategy before you pick a plan.

This article covers what Nextcloud actually needs, how that maps to real Romania VPS plans and prices, what to do when 60–240 GB isn't enough, and what self-hosting does and doesn't do for your privacy.

The direct answer: which plan size you need

For a private cloud serving 1–5 people with documents, photos and phone backups:

• 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM (Iron 1, €3.99/mo, 25 GB NVMe) — technically possible with SQLite and preview generation disabled, but tight. Fine as a test install or a small file drop for one person. Expect sluggish web UI and memory pressure once PHP-FPM, a database and Redis run together.
• 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM (Iron 2, €7.99/mo, 60 GB NVMe) — the realistic starting point. Enough for nginx + PHP-FPM + MariaDB + Redis, background jobs, and thumbnail generation without fighting the OOM killer. This is where most personal Nextcloud installs belong.
• 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM (Iron 3, €14.99/mo, 120 GB NVMe) — needed if you add Collabora or ONLYOFFICE for in-browser document editing (document servers are memory-hungry), run full-text search, or have a handful of users syncing simultaneously.
• 8 vCPU / 16 GB RAM (Iron 4, €29.99/mo, 240 GB NVMe) — a small-team deployment with office editing, video previews, Talk, and room for the database and preview cache to grow.

If you want the broader workload-to-plan mapping beyond Nextcloud, the Romania VPS sizing guide covers other project types on the same hardware tiers.

What Nextcloud actually consumes

Nextcloud is a PHP application, not a monolith, and the load profile is lumpy rather than constant.

RAM is the main bottleneck. A production-sane stack means PHP-FPM worker processes, a real database (MariaDB or PostgreSQL — not SQLite), and Redis for transactional file locking and caching. Each PHP-FPM worker can hold 64–256 MB depending on what it's doing; the database wants its own buffer pool. Under 2 GB you are tuning constantly rather than using your cloud. If you insist on running lean, understand swap, zram and memory limits before you put real data on it.

CPU matters in bursts: preview/thumbnail generation for photos and videos, virus scanning if you enable it, and document conversion. Dedicated vCPU helps here because thumbnail jobs are exactly the kind of workload that stalls on a contended node.

Disk I/O matters during large sync operations and database writes. NVMe is a genuine advantage — Nextcloud's file-scan operations hammer the database with small writes, and that's where spinning or heavily shared storage shows up as "why is the web UI loading for eight seconds."

Bandwidth is usually the least of your worries. Your initial upload is the big event: syncing 40 GB of existing files is 40 GB of inbound traffic, once. After that, everyday document sync and phone photo uploads rarely total more than a few tens of gigabytes a month per person. Even the 1 TB allowance on the smallest plan is generous for personal use — though streaming your video library to yourself changes the math quickly. If you plan to stream media, run the numbers in the VPS bandwidth guide first.

The real constraint: NVMe is fast, not spacious

This is the honest limitation nobody mentions when they tell you to "just self-host." A VPS gives you 25–240 GB of local NVMe. If you're replacing a 2 TB Google One plan holding years of 4K video, no VPS plan is a drop-in substitute at a sane price. Fast local storage is expensive storage.

Three workable patterns:

1. Cut scope. Most people don't actually need their whole archive online. Documents, current projects, phone photo backup and shared folders often fit in 60–120 GB, with the cold archive living on encrypted external drives at home. This is the cheapest and simplest option, and it covers the majority of real use.

2. Object storage as the file backend. Nextcloud can use S3-compatible object storage as primary storage, keeping only the database, config and preview cache on the VPS disk. You get elastic capacity at a much lower per-gigabyte price, at the cost of adding a second provider to your trust and billing chain — which matters if the point of the exercise was removing identity links. Most object storage providers require conventional payment and accounts, so weigh that against the privacy you gained elsewhere.

3. VPS as the access layer, storage at home. Run WireGuard on the VPS and keep the bulk data on a machine at home behind it. The VPS provides the stable public IP, DDoS-protected entry point and TLS termination; your home connection provides cheap terabytes. The trade-off is that your upload speed and home uptime become the user experience.

Pick the pattern before you pick the plan. Migrating 50 GB of user data between storage backends later is a weekend you won't enjoy.

What self-hosting changes about your privacy — and what it doesn't

Moving files from a hyperscaler to your own server is a real change in who can read them. There's no provider-side content scanning, no policy-driven account suspension that locks you out of your own documents, and no advertising or model-training pipeline attached to your data. You hold the admin account and the encryption keys.

Paying with Monero and signing up without an email means the hosting account itself carries no identity data — no name, no billing address, no card number sitting in a provider database waiting for a breach or a subpoena. There is no password reset email because there's no email, which is why recovery keys matter on anonymous accounts.

What it doesn't change: the disk is in a datacenter you don't physically control. Your VPS host can see your resource usage, your IP addresses, which ports you expose, and — in principle — the contents of your virtual disk and RAM from the hypervisor level. That's true of every virtualized host anywhere. We've written an honest breakdown of what a VPS provider can actually see and what no-KYC removes, and it's worth reading before you decide your threat model is solved.

The practical mitigation isn't full-disk encryption on a remote server — that mostly protects against disposed-drive scenarios, not a live host. It's client-side encryption for the folders that genuinely matter: encrypt sensitive directories with something like Cryptomator or an rclone crypt remote before they reach the server. Nextcloud's own server-side end-to-end encryption app has a long history of rough edges and sync problems; don't bet irreplaceable data on it.

IronBalkans fits this pattern specifically because the hosting layer asks for nothing: account creation needs no email, name, phone or ID, payment is Monero, Bitcoin or Litecoin, and the server is live in under 60 seconds with a dedicated IPv4 and a /64 IPv6 block on real KVM virtualization in Bucharest. You can see the full plan lineup on the pricing section.

What to check before you pay

• Real KVM with dedicated resources. Nextcloud's bursty CPU and I/O profile is exactly what suffers on oversold containers. You want your own kernel and your own vCPU allocation.
• Disk size headroom, not just today's data. The preview cache, database and trash bin all grow. Budget roughly 25–30% above your actual file size.
• A backup destination that isn't the same server. Self-hosting means you are the backup department. Your Nextcloud instance is not a backup — it's a single copy with a sync client attached. Set up encrypted off-site backups with restic or Borg on day one, including database dumps, and actually test a restore.
• Renewal mechanics with no card on file. Crypto billing means nothing auto-charges. Know the renewal date and grace period before your file server is the thing that expires.
• Monthly, not annual, for the first term. €7.99 is a cheap way to find out whether self-hosting suits you. Don't prepay a year to save a few euros on a setup you haven't lived with yet.

Common mistakes

Undersizing to save €4/mo. The difference between the 1 GB and 4 GB plan is roughly the price of a coffee, and it's the difference between a snappy private cloud and a weekend of PHP-FPM tuning.

Using SQLite in production. It works until two clients sync at once, then you get file-locking errors and corrupted scans. Use MariaDB or PostgreSQL plus Redis from the start.

Leaving the default cron setup. Nextcloud's AJAX cron is unreliable; use system cron or systemd timers, or background jobs silently stop and your previews, file scans and notifications quietly rot.

Skipping fail2ban and rate limiting. A public Nextcloud login page gets credential-stuffed. Enable brute-force protection, use strong passwords plus TOTP, and consider keeping the admin interface reachable only over WireGuard.

Assuming "offshore" means consequence-free. Romanian and EU law still applies. No-KYC hosting removes identity collection, not legal reality — for your own documents and photos that's irrelevant, but don't confuse the two.

Pros and cons

Pros: no provider scanning your content; no identity attached to the hosting account; flat predictable pricing instead of per-gigabyte creep; full root control over apps, retention and sharing; fast NVMe and a dedicated IP with DDoS protection included.

Cons: storage ceiling is real and lower than consumer cloud plans; you own all maintenance, updates and backups; no phone-support safety net; client-side encryption is your job, not a checkbox; mobile sync apps are good but not as polished as the commercial incumbents.

FAQ

Can I run Nextcloud on the €3.99 plan? Yes, technically — single user, SQLite or a tuned MariaDB, previews off, 25 GB of files. It's a legitimate way to test the idea cheaply. Move to 4 GB RAM before you trust it with daily work.

How much storage do I actually need? Check your current cloud usage, then subtract the media archive you never open. Most people land between 30 and 100 GB of genuinely active data, which fits the 60 GB or 120 GB tiers with object storage or home storage handling the long tail.

Will anyone know I'm running a private cloud? Your domain, TLS certificate and public login page are visible to anyone who looks. No-KYC hosting hides the account holder's identity from the provider, not the existence of the service from the internet. Keep it behind a VPN if even its existence should stay private.

Can I host other people's files on it? If those files contain personal data about EU residents, GDPR obligations attach to you as controller, including a processor agreement with your host. For family and personal use that's a non-issue; for clients, read the rules first.

Get started

If you've decided the storage trade-off is worth the control, the practical path is cheap and fast: take the 2 vCPU / 4 GB plan at €7.99/mo, deploy Debian or Ubuntu LTS, install Nextcloud with MariaDB and Redis, point a domain at your dedicated IPv4, and set up encrypted off-site backups the same day. Payment is Monero, Bitcoin or Litecoin, signup needs no email or ID, and the server is ready in under a minute.

Create an account and deploy a VPS when you're ready — no card, no identity, and no twelve-month commitment to find out whether self-hosting suits you.