It is safer in the sense that, when you selfhost, you have to take care of your own backups. You have to make sure your data is still there, even if two hard drives fail, or your house catches fire and your server burns down. Hertzner is doing that for you.
But you are right of course, from a privacy standpoint it would be much better to have your data on your own server and only send encrypted backups to a remote server like Hertzner.
Here is how I (noobinoob) built my own Nextcloud-Server
Hardware: I took the old PC from my aunt, no idea about the specs. Added 4 x 8 TB NAS HDD drives and removed the graphics card, the onboard graphic from the CPU was enough. No raid-controller, just connected the hard drives to the motherboard. In future I can add a PCI-Card with more SATA-ports.
Software: I installed Linux Debian, put my 4 HDD drives in a btrfs-raid1 pool, encrypted them with LUCS, installed dropbear to ssh into my server when it is not started and unlocked yet, installed ddclient to update my domain with my home-IP and followed most (not all) of this guide to install nextcloud. Unfortunately, it is in german, but there are plenty of english intructions out there.
internet-stuff: I bought a domain (10 Euro/year) and set up DynDNS. I opened the neccessary ports on my router/firewall.
I had to look up a lot of things and failed many many times, but now it works and I am very happy with it - no downtime in the last year. It took about 6-12 months to get there.
In conclusion: Your way (nextcloud on hetzner) is the much better way. You save time and money and your data is more secure.
But if you want to learn a lot of new stuff, building your own server is fun.
It would be easy to unlock the devices for different Software - like ugreen does.
And imagine all the possible backdoors in their software. No one can check, because it is closed source. And this on a device with your most senisble data.
Calling their acting ‘responsible’ is a huuuge strech.
I sold my Synology NAS as soon as I found out, that I can’t change the underlying software (DiskStationManager). It wasn’t open source and the hardware was dependent on that propriatary software. As soon as they decide, that your device is too old, they drop support and you are left with an unsecure brick.
And you are saying the software is open source. Did I miss something? Did something change?
We have those walmart brand equivalents in Germany, from supermarkets like Lidl, Norma and co…
In my world, people who come to the task with a brand new, expensive Makita drill deserve way more mockery than people who come with a cheap, well used Lidl drill.
We should and I will.
I started with 30, so not far off. My first step was to try to daily drive Linux. Best decision ever, working with a computer suddenly was fun and exciting again.