I’m just mildly curious. I know this isn’t the self hosting chan, but how many of you self host services as part of your efforts to retain your privacy, security, and anonymity?
I’ve been self hosting something for decades now. I got really started back in the PreNapster era. I ran an independent, selfhosted, fully licensed, internet radio outfit. That was back when music on the internet was a lot of cheap, tinny, geocities, midis. LOL I worked with a company called IM Radio Networks. They and Phillips, developed one of the world’s first bookshelf stereo, that was internet ready. Hook it up to the internet, and you could listen to AM/FM and IM radio. I’ve often mused that if it weren’t for Shawn Fanning, the music landscape on the internet might look a bit different as he forced the music industry to reevaluate how they did business.
Now, I self host a ton of stuff just for my own needs. It’s an enjoyable, purposeful, hobby, that keeps me busy. It’s also, so very educational, and I learn new things daily.
ETA: Man it does my heart good to meet and greet privacy minded users who also self host. It is an integral part of my privacy, anonymity, and security posture. If you aren’t already, or are thinking of self hosting, do it! You don’t need massive racks in the closet that dim the lights on reboot. A simple NUC or even RPi are quite capable of serving up services. You don’t need a Tier 1 feed from your ISP. Keep it simple and basic and work up from there to meet your needs.
Thanks again to all those who responded and shared their experiences.
I too am using a Cloudflare tunnel for my public facing services (such as WordPress), and that also allows you to put the WP login page behind another auth login as well which is great for security, so I do also vouch for Cloudflare.
I’m using Pangolin for private services on a VPS.
Plus, I have one service that is direct to my home IP for file sharing to one particular remote IP that is the only service directly through my firewall.
Therefore I have 3 ways my services are accessed and this has been the game changer for me recently, as previously I tried to run all this through one Caddy reverse proxy directly to my router and it gets painfully fragile mixing public/private services through one bottleneck when you’re tinkering as a selfhoster. So splitting it up has helped massively.
Good tip with the Cloudflare alts though!
Full disclosure, it took me a few tries to wrap this noodle around it. That’s usually par for the course tho. Some things just stump me for some reason. Caddy was like that until I kept pursuing it seriously. Then one day I read a tut online and lifted one paragraph that was essential, and ding! The lights came on, the clouds separated, and it was so clear. Now, to me, Caddy is very easy and I am embarrassed that it took me so long. But, that’s part of the journey.
Yeah, Caddy was working fine, but the issue was me tinkering with it meant having to reload Caddy for the updated config to work, and that would break any connections people were using for file transfers etc. Also, it isn’t as quick for reverse proxying file transfers.
Therefore trying to run private and public services through it was limiting when I was also trying to tweak it constantly for my homelab.
I’ve found Traefik to be better in that it auto reloads the config live as you edit it, and it’s been faster for file transfers on my 1Gbps fibre.
And now I’ve split my services to separate public/private reverse proxies, that takes the pressure of having to keep one proxy always live. Pangolin uses Traefik, and so do I for my direct services through my firewall, and that makes life easier when only dealing with one type of proxy service.
Messed around with it a bit. It’s another one of those things I have to do and fail at a few times which is why I have a little cheap VPS to test on.
Doesn’t cloudflare think you’re a bot when you remove tracking portions of urls? Cloudflare prevents me from seeing sites, but I am not a bot. Maybe the answer is I shouldn’t go to shitty sites to begin with.
You might have to unpack that for me as the caffine and morning meds haven’t quite yet soaked in and I’m not up to operating temps yet. Are you talking about Cloudflare verification checks? Like, you click to a site, it asks you to verify if you are a bot or not? If so, with the Cloudflare Tunnel/ZeroTrust, no it doesn’t ask for verification. Now, in the options for the Cloudflare/ZeroTrust tunnel, there is a section where you can set that up, but out of the box, you don’t get verification checks.