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Self hosting in 2023

grifel.dev

111–120 of 307 posts

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#111

Self hosting is really cool. However when it comes to static hosting, apart than keeping your data at home and having fun setting up servers, I don't really see the point when there's so many free good options. I use CloudFlare Pages for my blog, their integration with GitHub is flawless and you get to host your website at edge for free. When I need to host dynamic content, another good option is CloudFlare Tunnels (…

I have lost count of how many sites Cloudflare has interfered with, insisting on proving myself human yet again, during the past three months. This is about the time I started using the LibreWolf browser (even disabling adblocker). When I open up Chromium, the problems stop.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#112
post #5

If you don't need all that cloud operations/deployment infrastructure, self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding, run some apache/nginx/whatever and push your files with sftp or similar to the server. In contrast to 2003, upstreams got better -- even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1]. With 20mbit/sec you can do quite s…

My problem is that I have never been able to purchase residential internet that allowed me to open port 443 or port 80.

Cloudflare Tunnel is great for NAT traversal.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#113
post #68

I'm all for self-hosting and run a few services on my LAN, but would never allow HTTP traffic from the internet to enter my network. If you've ever seen a public nginx log, you'll know it constantly gets hit by all kinds of bots and vulnerability scanners. No matter how secure and isolated I make the web server, I just don't want to see that traffic, nor expose my home IP to further scrutiny. It's trivial to host a s…

You can create a second network behind your router to keep your LAN separate from the server's LAN.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#114

Self hosting is really cool. However when it comes to static hosting, apart than keeping your data at home and having fun setting up servers, I don't really see the point when there's so many free good options. I use CloudFlare Pages for my blog, their integration with GitHub is flawless and you get to host your website at edge for free. When I need to host dynamic content, another good option is CloudFlare Tunnels (…

CloudFlare is a MITM against its clients, by design. Everyone is good when things are good, but when trouble comes ..

If it comes, you switch to a different hosting provider in about 5 minutes, that's not a very big effort

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#115
post #5

If you don't need all that cloud operations/deployment infrastructure, self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding, run some apache/nginx/whatever and push your files with sftp or similar to the server. In contrast to 2003, upstreams got better -- even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1]. With 20mbit/sec you can do quite s…

Not _exactly_ as easy, you also need a valid https cert, and set up a cronjob to renew it. And for some other reply here, "as easy as it was in 2003" really doesn't mean "easy" :v

"Not _exactly_ as easy, you also need a valid https cert, and set up a cronjob to renew it. And for some other reply here, "as easy as it was in 2003" really doesn't mean "easy" :v"

Took me 15 minutes.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#116

> a cheap UPS to keep it running in case of power outage (which happened once in the past year, so it might be a bit overkill). I don't think this is overkill, I think it's necessary. A UPS is pretty cheap compared to the completely-uncontrollable chance of losing power in the middle of working on something . Sure, there's autosave and most things are relatively recoverable, but this is just such a cheap investment (…

"I don't think this is overkill, I think it's necessary. A UPS is pretty cheap compared to the completely-uncontrollable chance of losing power in the middle of working on something."

I'm using a laptop as a server and will buy a UPS for my modem/wifi. That combo will offer many hours of uptime without power.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#117
post #5

If you don't need all that cloud operations/deployment infrastructure, self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding, run some apache/nginx/whatever and push your files with sftp or similar to the server. In contrast to 2003, upstreams got better -- even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1]. With 20mbit/sec you can do quite s…

Not _exactly_ as easy, you also need a valid https cert, and set up a cronjob to renew it. And for some other reply here, "as easy as it was in 2003" really doesn't mean "easy" :v

Super easy with the right DNS provider and something like go-acme/Lego. Add a crom job and done. Yeah, not zero effort but compared to early Let's Encrypt with HTTP-01 and such it's quote easy.

https://github.com/go-acme/lego

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#118
post #68

I'm all for self-hosting and run a few services on my LAN, but would never allow HTTP traffic from the internet to enter my network. If you've ever seen a public nginx log, you'll know it constantly gets hit by all kinds of bots and vulnerability scanners. No matter how secure and isolated I make the web server, I just don't want to see that traffic, nor expose my home IP to further scrutiny. It's trivial to host a s…

Random http traffic seems about as harmless as it ever was, if you just host static pages, or your own scripts/software and nothing generic.

What's a bit iffy is the privacy aspects. If you host anything that can identify you, your identity is just a HTTP request away for anyone who sees traffic from your IP address.

But these concerns can be somewhat mitigated by making the server drop connections unless a known Host header or SNI is sent.

Wholly recommended if you host stuff on your hope IP!

Easily done with nginx by ensuring all server {} blocks have a proper server_name and a separate default server {} block just having return 444. So unless someone already knows the domain name of your home server, they'll not be able to access it with just an IP address. You'll stop many bots this way, too.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#119

One thing to be mindful of is security. The last you want is for your setup to be compromised, be used to send spam/botnets and then getting perma-banned from your ISP. I would argue it's a lot less risky just to put your static site on S3/Github etc.

If you're using a modern web server like nginx, then you have to really do something wrong to get hacked serving static files.

Re: Self hosting in 2023

#120
post #5

If you don't need all that cloud operations/deployment infrastructure, self hosting a website from home in 2023 is as easy as it was in 2003. Get a DDNS, do the NAT port forwarding, run some apache/nginx/whatever and push your files with sftp or similar to the server. In contrast to 2003, upstreams got better -- even Germany has average upstream speeds of 20mbit/second nowadays [1]. With 20mbit/sec you can do quite s…

I would argue it is much easier now. There are a ton of distributions who are catering for this use case, yunohost is probably the most well known one, but there are a lot more if you look on the awesome selfhosted list.

I would also say that if you only want a static site the OPs setup is almost overkill. Just install caddy and a dyndns service. Takes care of the certificate for you and is super simple to setup.

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