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.
One aspect is how interesting you are as a target. What would a possible attacker gain by getting access to your services or hosts?
The danger to get hacked is there but you are not Microsoft, amazon or PayPal. Expect login attempts and port scans from actors who map out the internets. But I doubt someone would spend much effort to break into your hosts if you do not make it easy (like scripted automatic exploits and known passwords login attempts easy) .
DDOS protection isn’t something a tiny self hosted instance would need (at least in my experience).
Firewall your hosts, maybe use a reverse proxy and only expose the necessary services. Use secure passwords (different for each service), add fail2ban or the like if you’re paranoid. Maybe look into MFA. Use a DMZ (yes, VLANs could be involved here). Keep your software updated so that exploits don’t work. Have backups if something breaks or gets broken.
In my experience the biggest danger to my services is my laziness. It takes steady low level effort to keep the instances updated and running. (Yes there are automated update mechanisms - unattended upgrades i.e. -, but also downwards compatibility breaking changes in the software which will require manual interactions by me.)
+1 for the main risk to my service reliability being me getting distracted by some other shiny thing and getting behind on maintenance.
…maybe use a reverse proxy…
+1 post.
I would suggest definitely reverse proxy. Caddy should be trivial in this use case.
cheers,
I have a dozen services running on a myriad of ports. My reverse proxy setup allows me to map hostnames to those services and expose only 80/443 to the web, plus the fact that an entity needs to know a hostname now instead of just an exposed port. IPS signatures can help identify abstract hostname scans and the proxy can be configured to permit only designated sources. Reverse proxies also commonly get used to allow for SSL offloading to permit clear text observation of traffic between the proxy and the backing host. Plenty of other use cases for them out there too, don’t think of it as some one trick off/on access gateway tool
May not add security in and of itself, but it certainly adds the ability to have a little extra security. Put your reverse proxy in a DMZ, so that only it is directly facing the intergoogles. Use firewall to only expose certain ports and destinations exposed to your origins. Install a single wildcard cert and easily cover any subdomains you set up. There’s even nginx configuration files out there that will block URL’s based on regex pattern matches for suspicious strings. All of this (probably a lot more I’m missing) adds some level of layered security.
A reverse proxy is used to expose services that don’t run on exposed hosts. It does not add security but it keeps you from adding attack vectors.
They usually provide load balancing too, also not a security feature.
Edit: in other words what he’s saying is true and equal to “raid isn’t baclup”
