I agree with the praise for IRC, but I don't see what you need grove for. There's mibbit, irccloud and a few other web IRC clients, all of which seem quite a bit more advanced than grove. And for the server-part; why not hop onto freenode, make a private channel - and off you go?
If you insist on private server then that shouldn't take someone linux-savvy more than 15 minutes either.
You literally type 'apt-get install inspircd', tweak two and a half values in the config file (to enable SSL and set a server-password) - and that's it. An irc-daemon is not exactly maintenance-heavy, mine has been running for over a year without a blip.
Firstly, you're not actually allowed to use freenode like that, technically it's supposed to be for open source projects right?
Secondly, I wouldn't run a server application like that on a publicly accessible server without learning pretty thoroughly about how to configure it securely, ymmv obviously but I just wouldn't do it.
Thirdly, there are a bunch of web configuration options that allow non-technical folks to login and do a bunch of stuff. If my client were paying me to do that for them they'd blow their Grove.io budget by an order of magnitude or two each month.
If you insist on private server then that shouldn't take someone linux-savvy more than 15 minutes either.
You literally type 'apt-get install inspircd', tweak two and a half values in the config file (to enable SSL and set a server-password) - and that's it. An irc-daemon is not exactly maintenance-heavy, mine has been running for over a year without a blip.