this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Hi everyone!

I'm looking into self-hosting, and I currently have dynamic DNS set up to point to my home IP.

My question: is it worth getting a dedicated IP through a VPN?

I'm pretty technically savvy, but when it comes to networking I lack practical experience. My thought is that pointing my domain to a dedicated IP and routing that traffic to my home IP would be safer - especially if I only allow traffic on certain ports from that IP. Just curious if that idea holds up in practice, or if it's not worth the effort.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can do that or you can use a reverse proxy to expose your services without opening ports for every service. With a reverse proxy you would point port 80 and 443 to the reverse proxy once traffic hits your router/firewall. In the reverse proxy you would configure hostnames that point to the local service IP/ports. Reverse proxy servers like nginx proxy manager then allow you to setup https certificates for every service you expose. They also allow you to disable access to them through a single interface.

I do this and have setup some blocklists on the opnsense firewall. Specifically you could setup the spamhaus blocklists to drop any traffic that originates from those ips. You can also use the Emerging Threats Blocklist. It has spamhaus and a few more integrated from dshield ect. These can be made into simple firewall rules.

If you want to block entire country ips you can setup the GeoIP blocklist in opnsense. This requires a maxmind account but allows you to pick and choose countries.

You can also setup the suricatta ips in opnsense to block detected traffic from daily updates lists. It's a bit more resource intensive from regular firewall rules but also far more advanced at detecting threats.

I use both firewall lists and ips scanning both the wan and lan in promiscuous mode. This heavily defends your network in ways that most modern networks can't even take advantage.

You want even more security you can setup unbound with DNS over TLS. You could even setup openvpn and route all your internal traffic through that to a VPN provider. Personally I prefer having individual systems connect to a VPN service.

Anyway all this to say no you don't need a VPN static IP. You may prefer instead a domain name you can point to your systems. If you're worried about security here identify providers that allow crypto and don't care about identity. This is true for VPN providers as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thank you for such an in-depth reply!

There's a lot to take in here, but it sounds like I've got some work to do - not necessarily a bad thing. It's honestly about time I took my network more seriously and set up some proper routing / firewalls.