First, I am unable to host. My apartment wifi forbids it and I’m too poor to afford my own wifi.
Is there a good alternative to google docs? Preferably on the cloud, if not then that’s fine. I know LibreOffice writer exists but to my knowledge it lacks Doc’s document tab thing, which I make extensive use of, and cloud services. I’m trying to get off Google as much as I can, but the cloud hosted aspect of Docs is very useful, both for sharing links to documents quickly and for opening up a document on any of my 3 devices without having to sync or update the documents manually.
You can use a small Nextcloud in combination with collabora. As far as I know there’s still a free option for a small Nextcloud with up to 8 GB of cloud storage currently. To work on your various documents on the go I recommend collabora, which I use on my phone. On your desktop you can use any number of office applications that support the file standards you’re working with. I haven’t tried collabora on desktop, but it supposedly works there as well. I personally use Softmaker’s Free Office Suite on desktop with cloud storage on the Nextcloud. So far I’ve managed to keep this entire setup free and (apart from Softmaker’s Office) open source.