Providing Secure Access to Files to Individuals via the Web

I pay for a service that hosts my website. The hosting service charges me for storage. I would like to provide individual clients credentials-based access to an area of my website where they can view and download files BUT I want those files to remain on my local server. I have Nextcloud 2.1.19 running within TrueNAS Scale 25.10 locally. (I will eventually host my website locally, but that’s not happening soon.)

I believe this is do’able, but it’s sufficiently complex that, combined with my inexperience, I’m having difficulty pulling the pieces together. So I post here, and hope to get some assistance from folks with casual experience with this sort of thing. You there, reading this; can you provide some guidance on how I can string together what I need to get this working?

It is complex today… NextCloud probably as better tools.

There are plans for a capability in 26.04 to “webshare” files… there will be information coming out over the next month.

There’s a first peek at it in the last podcast