With the recent news, VPN bans being tested in western countries and even states like Michigan toying with new internet censorship; it’s had me thinking that I need to up my self hosting game. I currently use Truenas scale electric eel and I really am a novice with no formal education. I have a myriad of apps running, learned through YouTube tutorials, documentation, and AI. I tunnel out some of these services via cloudflare zero trust to a domain. I’ve got pi-hole running on the network and a VPN on my windows machine but that’s about it. It’s great! It works! It’s fun to tinker with and has allowed my family to ditch a lot of subscriptions. Browsing around, though, I see a lot of comments about different ways to secure servers. Everytime I try to learn about something such as VPS, reverse proxies it feels like an inundation of too much information and differing opinions. It seems like there are so many ways to do it that I really have no clue where to begin. I also don’t want to break what is currently working for me.

Anyone have a good idea on good sources to educate myself? Is it vital I learn how to run some sort of local service? How would hard government crackdown shutdown VPNs and what could a self-hoster do to avoid that? Be gentle. Thanks.