Hey there!
I’m thinking about starting a blog about privacy guides, security, self-hosting, and other shenanigans, just for my own pleasure. I have my own server running Unraid and have been looking at self-hosting Ghost as the blog platform. However, I am wondering how “safe” it is to use one’s own homelab for this. If you have any experience regarding this topic, I would gladly appreciate some tips.
I understand that it’s relatively cheap to get a VPS, and that is always an option, but it is always more fun to self-host on one’s own bare metal! :)
There’s nothing wrong with just using a VPS for this. Despite what some mouth-frothing hobbyists will tell you, it’s still well within the realm of self hosting. There’s just no reason or difference for hosting a blog on your UnRAID server vs a VPS.
If you really want to be some kind of purist and only use your own hardware, then you could configure a web server that can reverse proxy on your UnRAID server and forward port 443 in your router to your UnRAID box, but you’d have to change your UnRAID access port to something else. You’d want to keep this web server docker container up to date, and preferably see if you can implement some kind of WAF with it or in front of it. You’d then forward the requests from this web server to your ghost container.
A better idea would be to use a different piece of hardware for this web server reverse proxy, like a raspberry pi or something, and put it on a different subnet in your house. Forward 443 to that, then proxy the connection back to UnRAID, in whatever port you bind the ghost container to. Then you can tighten access that raspberry pi has. Or hell, host the blog on that hardware as well and don’t allow any traffic to your main LAN.
There are half a dozen better ways to do this, but they all require you to rely on a third party service to some extent.