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.
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A fixed IP does make things easier at first, but I fail to see the value on that for personal use. Nothing a reverse proxy and DDNS can't replace.
I purchased a domain, use dynamic DNS for it, and point my sub domains to an NGINX proxy server that handles where each points to.
Nothing has access to anything in my network from the internet (all ports are closed on my PFSense), other than Wireguard, and I just VPN into my network when I'm not home.
It was scary when I started, but figured it out in a couple of days. Take into consideration that I'm not even mildly smart, so it should be fairly easy for anyone.
Get into forums, ask around, watch tutorials, you'll be up and running in no time.
Good luck.
Thanks for the reply!
So the NGINX server hosted outside your network, then? And then reverse-proxy that into your home server?
Honestly, I feel like NGINX is a bit overkill for my situation, since I'm not expecting to have a lot of traffic. I could be wrong, though.
Their setup sounds similar to mine. But no, only a single service is exposed to the internet: wireguard.
The idea is that you can have any number of servers running on your lan, etc... but in order to access them remotely you first need to VPN into your home network. This way the only thing you need to worry about security wise is wireguard. If there's a security hole / vulnerability in one of the services you're running on your network or in nginx, etc... attackers would still need to get past wireguard first before they could access your network.
But here is exactly what I've done:
Now I can just turn on my phone's VPN whenever I need to access any one of the services that would normally only be accessible from home.
P.s. there's additional steps I did to ensure that the masquerade of the VPN was disabled, that all VPN clients use my pihole, and that I can still get decent internet speeds while on the VPN. But that's slightly beyond the original ask here.
Wouldn't this require any user to connect to the VPN though? I'm looking for something more publicly accessible - say like a website.
Yes it would. In my case though I know all of the users that should have remote access snd I'm more concerned about unauthorized access than ease of use.
If I wanted to host a website for the general public to use though, I'd buy a VPS and host it there. Then use SSH with private key authentication for remote management. This way, again, if someone hacks that server they can't get access to my home lan.