Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil.
-
No spam.
-
Posts are to be related to self-hosting.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or readme if you're providing a link.
-
Submission headline should match the article title.
-
No trolling.
-
Promotion posts require active participation, with an account that is at least 30 days old. F/LOSS without a paywall has exceptions, with requirements. See the rules link for details. Tags [CBH] or [AIP] are required, see the links in Rule 8 for details.
-
AI-related discussions and AI-involved promotional posts have additional requirements for tagging, as noted in Rule 7 and the AI & Promotional Post Expanded Rules post, and find example disclosures here.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
view the rest of the comments
A reverse proxy is the traditional safe route. Use a web server like Apache, nginx or caddy, and setup to reverse proxy all your services through port 443, and use let's encrypt and certbot to generate and manage TLS certificates.
I host around 15 public facing web services this way using nginx.
Just be aware, this is very public facing so server security and hardening is important. Things like strong passwords, disabled root, use ssh keys instead of passwords, setup fail2ban, setup crowdsec etc.
The more modern safer way is not to truly expose to full public and use things like tailscale or cloudflare tunnels. But this relies on 3rd party servers and I'm not a fan of that, but it does bring benefits.
A lot of folk decry Cloudflare as a terrible corp (and their AI push now involves the login page shunted to the side while 70% of the screen is a relatively blank section with some sentence about using their AI), but what is the non-3rd party alternative? Does one rely on sharing the IP instead? It is impossible to have public (non-family) traffic without a Cloudflare/Google DNS resolver right?
Being on a standard ISP I cannot use a higher-level rDNS.
im on a basic uk isp, with no fancy router, just the isp provided one. i have a fully exposed web server, im even hosting a lemmy server. Thats my domain, radiantfig.fyi, totally public, has been for nearly 2 years now. From that you can get my servers IP address. My IP is dynamic, changes roughly every 6 weeks. I have a ddns script that updates my server IP address to my domain name provider automatically. I have certbot running updating my TLS certs with lets encrypt, and if a cert dies or fails or is compromised, my server will refuse to serve. Everything is behind an nginx reverse proxy through port 443. I also have an ssh port open on a random port. Have fail2ban setup fairly aggressively to prevent brute force attacks, and have crowdsec which also kind of does the same but in a slightly different way. the internet requires ip addresses. to protect your ip address you have to give somebody elses. that somebody is a 3rd party you have no control or say on the decisions they make. i must have over 20 individual services that are public facing. 3 fully federated, lemmy, forgejo and matrix. Im as secure as any other website. nothing is unhackable, no matter how far down the rabbit hole you go. its all just layers of difficulty.
The important thing is dont listen to random internet people about security. dont listen to me. dont listen to anybody who tells you they know best. do your own research, understand the options, the risks, the compromises. only then do you put anything up. but if you are going to anxious or worried about your server and data, no amount of security guarantees you safety, so be warned.