I’ve been doing small hosting off and on for a while. Mainly for accessing files at home and the occasional Minecraft server. Not smart, as I’ve never used a specialized router. I used to use ddwrt, but now it’s impossible to flash most consumer grade routers.
id like to learn more stuff about cyber security, host other stuff, maybe host a website, but I’m just a guy who lives in an apartment. I’m stuck with 1 Internet service that claims it will terminate my service if they find me to be hosting anything. They must be semi-lax with that rule, because i haven’t gotten terminated for using ssh and cockpit.
Do you guys own a house, or are just fortunate enough to have access to an ISP that will let you host your own stuff?
You can use things like Tailscale or Cloudflare Tunnel for hosting things inside your home network. I’d use Tailscale if only you or a couple of people need access to your internal network and services, or Cloudflare Tunnel if you want to expose your self-hosted services to the outside world.
I personally have the luxury to have 2 internet connections available to me. I live in an apartment where ISP connection A is shared among the residents (they all have their own router connected, so using double-nat, which is not great but it works), and I managed to negotiate with the landlord that I could use a dedicated fiber connection since it does not disrupt the rest of the residents, and my work pays that bill. It’s small virtual ISP, so I was also able to request a static public IP.
For my network at home, I’m using a Unifi stack: UDM-Pro and USW-Pro. For running services on my network, I have a server running Unraid where I mostly host services in containers of which I expect a lot of data to be stored on. Rest of my services I run on 6 thinclient grade hardware ( 4 Lenovo ThinkCenter M73 Tiny, 1 HP ProDesk 600 G3 and 1 Shuttle XH61V) using Nomad for the container clustering, docker as the runtime engine, and Consul for service discovery.
My router port-forwards a select number of ports (80 and 443 among things) to my reverse proxy (Traefik) which then routes the connections to the correct services based on the URL and other rules.
But, if your ISP is being difficult… renting a VPS these days is a viable option.