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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.

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How safe is self-hosting a public website behind Cloudflare? (feddit.uk)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I work in tech and am constantly finding solutions to problems, often on other people's tech blogs, that I think "I should write that down somewhere" and, well, I want to actually start doing that, but I don't want to pay someone else to host it.

I have a Synology NAS, a sweet domain name, and familiarity with both Docker and Cloudflare tunnels. Would I be opening myself up to a world of hurt if I hosted a publicly available website on my NAS using [insert simple blogging platform], in a Docker container and behind some sort of Cloudflare protection?

In theory that's enough levels of protection and isolation but I don't know enough about it to not be paranoid about everything getting popped and providing access to the wider NAS as a whole.

Update: Thanks for the replies, everyone, they've been really helpful and somewhat reassuring. I think I'm going to have a look at Github and Cloudflare's pages as my first port of call for my needs.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Cloudflare tunnels are layer 7, so it's not unlimited access by any means. This also means that certain things will break btw, for example if your website uses websockets to load information, that isn't supported.

Next, I'd put the computer that is going to be hosting into an isolated vlan of its own and access via external URL only.

If you're going to use docker images, make sure to vet that they're updated often and always spin up the latest.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

CF tunnels are layer 3, not 7 and they have support for web sockets. It's basically wireguard VPN with a few extras built on top.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/faq/cloudflare-tunnels-faq/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

That document doesn't say what layer. But it does say it supports Websockets.

Just odd that when I try to set it up using a named tunnel I don't get an option to specify the WS service type. However it does require a service type if you want to connect to it.

Looking at this page it would seem that it's a layer 7. Although I could be wrong, but my front end app has issues finding my backend service for websockets.

Granted I even tried to connect to my private computer using other protocols. I couldn't get through. Anyway I'm most likely going to be taking that project offline soon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

No, but I thought I clarified that when I said it's basically wireguard VPN which operates using tcp/udp (layer 3.) layer 7 is stuff like https. CF tunnels are lower level.

Page you linked is missing the layer between CF and source server so it doesn't indicate layer. You can lookup wireguard protocol if you want more details.