I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc.
As I spend more time here, I realise that it is practically impossible; especially for a newcomer, to setup any any usable self hosted web service without relying on these corporate behemoths.
I wanted to have my own little static website and alongside that run Immich, but I find that without Cloudflare, Google, and AWS, I run the risk of getting DDOSed or hacked. Also, since the physical server will be hosted at my home (to avoid AWS), there is a serious risk of infecting all devices at home as well (currently reading about VLANS to avoid this).
Am I correct in thinking that avoiding these corporations is impossible (and make peace with this situation), or are there ways to circumvent these giants and still have a good experience self hosting and using web services, even as a newcomer (all without draining my pockets too much)?
Edit: I was working on a lot of misconceptions and still have a lot of learn. Thank you all for your answers.
If you are afraid of being ddosed which is very unlikely. Cloudflare has free ddos protection. You can put some but not all things behind their proxy.
Also instead of making things publicly available look in to using a VPN. Wireguard with “wireguard easy” makes this very simple.
VLANs do not make you network magically more secure. But when setup correctly can increase security a load if something has already penetrated the network. But also just to streamline a network and allow or deny some parts of the network.
Not my experience so far with my single service I’ve been running for a year. It’s making me even think of opening up even more stuff.
Drink less paranoia smoothie…
I’ve been self-hosting for almost a decade now; never bothered with any of the giants. Just a domain pointed at me, and an open port or two. Never had an issue.
Don’t expose anything you don’t share with others; monitor the things you do expose with tools like fail2ban. VPN into the LAN for access to everything else.
The DDOSED hype on this site is so over played. Oh my god my little self hosted services are going to get attacked. Is it technically possible yes but it hasn’t been my experience.
DDoSing cost the attacker some time and resources so there has to something in it for them.
Random servers on the internet are subject to lots of drive-by vuln scans and brute force login attempts, but not DDoS, which are most costly to execute.
99% of people think they are more important than they are.
If you THINK you might be the victim of an attack like this, you’re not going to be a victim of an attack like this. If you KNOW you’ll be the victim of an attack like this on the other hand…
Many of us also lived through the era where any 13 year old could steal Mommy’s credit card and rent a botnet for that ezpz
My MC server a decade ago was tiny and it still happened every few months when we banned some butthurt kid
You can simply set up a VPN for your home network (e.g. Tailscale, Netbird, Headscale, etc.) and you won’t have to worry about attacks. Public services require a little more work, you will need to rely on a service from a company, either a tunnel (e.g. Tailscale funnel) or a VPS.
mmm netbird seems cool, any experience with it?
Public services require a little more work, you will need to rely on a service from a company, either a tunnel (e.g. Tailscale funnel) or a VPS.
I have been hosting random public services for years publicly and it hasn’t been an issue.
Edit, I might have miss understood the definition of public. I have hosted stuff publicly, however everything was protected by a login screen. So it wasn’t something a random person could make use of.
If your SSH is using key authentication and you don’t have anything silly as an attack vector, you should be grand.
People who ho get compromised are the ones who expose a password authentication service with a short memorable password
DDOS against a little self hosted instance isn’t really a concern I’d have. I’d be more concerned with the scraping of private information, ransomware, password compromises, things of that nature. If you keep your edge devices on the latest security patches and you are cognizant on what you are exposing and how, you’ll be fine.
It depends on what your level of confidence and paranoia is. Things on the Internet get scanned constantly, I actually get routine reports from one of them that I noticed in the logs and hit them up via an associated website. Just take it as an expected that someone out there is going to try and see if admin/password gets into some login screen if it’s facing the web.
For the most part, so long as you keep things updated and use reputable and maintained software for your system the larger risk is going to come from someone clicking a link in the wrong email than from someone haxxoring in from the public internet.
I’ve self hosted home assistant for a few years, external access through Cloud flare now because it’s been so stablez but previously used DuckDNS which was a bit shit if I’m honest.
I got into self hosting proper earlier this year, I wanted to make something that I could sail the 7 seas with.
I use Tailscale for everything.
The only open port on my router is for Plex because I’m a socialist and like to share my work with my friends.
Just keep it all local and use it at home. If you wanna take some of your media outside with you, download it onto your phone before you leave
I’ve been self hosting for 2 or 3 years and haven’t been hacked, though I fully expect it to happen eventually(especially if I start posting my blog in places). I’d suggest self hosting a VPN to get into your home network and not making your apps accessible via the internet unless 100% necessary. I also use docker containers to minimize the apps access to my full system. Best of luck!
If you are CGNAT and use some tunnel (Wireguard, Tailscale, etc.) to access your services which are running on Docker containers, the attack vector is almost not existing.
It is easy to get hacked if you make stupid mistakes. Just don’t make them.
This is honestly true. Just follow good security practices
Is this some sort of insider I am not aware of? I always see these kind of replies and I never understand them. Why even write anything if you don’t have anything meaningful to add to the conversation? This is a genuine question to both of you. I mean, yes, it might be true that everything is fine and dandy if you follow good security practices? But how does that help a beginner? Its like saying driving a car with manual transmission is easy. You just need to know the numbers from 1 to 6 and that a higher number makes the car go faster. Even though this might be technically true, it doesn’t help anybody.
If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.
No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.
Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.
YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.
Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.
Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.
I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.
Yeah na, put your home services in Tailscale, and for your VPS services set up the firewall for HTTP, HTTPS and SSH only, no root login, use keys, and run fail2ban to make hacking your SSH expensive. You’re a much smaller target than you think - really it’s just bots knocking on your door and they don’t have a profit motive for a DDOS.
From your description, I’d have the website on a VPS, and Immich at home behind TailScale. Job’s a goodun.
Getting DDOSed or hacked is very very rare for anyone self hosting. DDOS doesn’t really happen to random people hosting a few small services, and hacking is also rare because it requires that you expose something with a significant enough vulnerability that someone has a way into the application and potentially the server behind it.
But it’s good to take some basic steps like an isolated VLAN as you’ve mentioned already, but also don’t expose services unless you need to. Immich for example if it’s just you using it will work just fine without being exposed to the internet.
