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! :)
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No, with these reasons:
- Bandwidth isn’t plenty
- My “uptime” at home isn’t great
- No redundant hardware, even a simple mainboard defect would take a while to replace
I have a VPS for these tasks, and I host a few sites for friends amd family.
Weeeell, there’s a school of though leaning towards the opinion that using VPS is still self-hosting ;)
I agree, but I understood this question in the context of a homelab.
And for me, a homelab is not the right place for a public website, for the reasons I mentioned.
And it’s a school of thought I happen to agree with. :) But OP specifically called out homelab vs VPS.
A VPS still counts as self-hosting :)
I host my sites on a VPS. Better internet connection and uptime, and you can get pretty good VPSes for less than $40/year.
The approach I’d take these days is to use a static site generator like Eleventy, Hugo, etc. These generate static HTML files. You can then store those files on literally any host. You can stick them on a VPS and serve them with any web server. You could upload them to a static file hosting service like BunnyCDN storage, Github Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, etc. Even Amazon S3 and Cloudfront if you want to pay more for the same thing. Note that Github Pages is extremely feature-poor so I’d usually recommend one of the others.
This is a bit fuzzy. You seem to recommend a VPS but then suggest a bunch of page-hosting platforms.
If someone is using a static site generator, then they’re already running a web server, even if it’s on localhost. The friction of moving the webserver to the VPS is basically zero, and that way they’re not worsening the web’s corporate centralization problem.
I host my sites on a VPS. Better internet connection and uptime, and you can get pretty good VPSes for less than $40/year.
I preferred this advice.
You seem to recommend a VPS but then suggest a bunch of page-hosting platforms.
Other comments were talking about pros and cons of self-hosting, so I tried to give advice for both approaches. I probably could have been clearer about thay in my comment though. I edited the comment a bit to try and clarify.
I have some static sites that I just rsync to my VPS and serve using Nginx. That’s definitely a good option.
If you want to make it faster by using a CDN and don’t want it to be too hard to set up, you’re going to have to use a CDN service.
Self-hosted CDN is doable, but way more effort. Anycast approach is to get your own IPv4 and IPv6 range, and get VPSes in multiple countries through a provider that allows BGP sessions (Vultr and HostHatch support this for example). Then you can have one IP that goes to the server that’s closest to the viewer. Easier approach is to use Geo DNS where your DNS server returns a different IP depending on the visitor’s location. You can self-host that using something like PowerDNS.
I have some static sites that I just rsync to my VPS and serve using Nginx. That’s definitely a good option.
Agree. And hard to get security wrong cos no database.
If you want to make it faster by using a CDN and don’t want it to be too hard to set up, you’re going to have to use a CDN service.
Yes but this can just be a drop-in frontend for the VPS. Point the domain to Cloudflare and tell only Cloudflare where to find the site. This provides IP privacy and also TLS without having to deal with LetsEncrypt. It’s not ideal because… Cloudflare… but at least you’re using standard web tools. To ditch Cloudflare you just unplug them at the domain and you still have a website.
Perhaps its irrational but I’m bothered by how many people seem to think that Github Pages is the only way to host a static website. I know that’s not your case.
That’s not Cloudflare-specific; you can use any CDN that supports origin pull in the same way :)
It’s not ideal because… Cloudflare… but at least you’re using standard web tools. To ditch Cloudflare you just unplug them at the domain and you still have a website.
Definitely agree with this! That’s one of the pain points of “cloud” services - they really try to lock you in, making it impossible to swotch.
without having to deal with LetsEncrypt.
You still need encryption between your CDN and your origin, ideally using a proper certificate. Let’s Encrypt (and other ACME services like ZeroSSL) are pretty easy to use, and can be fully automated. I’m using Let’s Encrypt even for internal servers on my network, using a DNS challenge for verification instead of a HTTP one.
Perhaps its irrational but I’m bothered by how many people seem to think that Github Pages is the only way to host a static website
It’s strange because out of all the possible options, Github Pages is the most basic. You have to store your generated files in a Git repo (which is kinda gross) and it barely supports any features. For example, it doesn’t support server logs or redirects.
I guess it’s popular because people already use Github and don’t want to look for other services?
You still need encryption between your CDN and your origin, ideally using a proper certificate.
It can be self-signed though, that’s what I’m doing and it’s partly to outsource the TLS maintenance. But the main reason I’m doing it is to get IP privacy. WHOIS domain privacy is fine, but to me it seems pretty sub-optimal for a personal site to be publicly associated with even a permanent IP address. A VPS is meant to be private, it’s in the name. This is something that doesn’t get talked about much. I don’t see any way to achieve this without a CDN, unfortunately.
I guess it’s popular because people already use Github and don’t want to look for other services?
Yes, and the general confusion between Git and Github, and between public things and private things. It’s everywhere today. Another example: saying “my Substack” as if blogging was just invented by this private company. So it’s worse than just laziness IMO. It’s a reflexive trusting of the private over the public.
it seems pretty sub-optimal for a personal site to be publicly associated with even a permanent IP address
What’s the downside you see from having a static IP address?
I don’t see any way to achieve this without a CDN, unfortunately.
I think you’re looking for a reverse proxy. CDNs are essentially reverse proxies with edge caching (their main feature is that they cache files on servers that are closer to a user), but it sounds like you don’t really care about the caching for your use case?
I don’t know if any companies provide reverse proxies without a CDN though.
What’s the downside you see from having a static IP address?
What’s the downside to having one’s phone number in the public directory? There’s no security risk and yet plenty of people opt out. It’s personally identifying information.
I don’t know if any companies provide reverse proxies without a CDN though.
Exactly.
This does seem like the way to go, thanks for the tips!
I’ve been looking to get a vps. Where do you get one under $40/year?
https://greencloudvps.com/billing/store/budget-kvm-sale
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/191501/real-deals-here-win-big-with-thousands-in-prizes-racknerds-new-year-offers-new-year-2024/ (New Year 2024 deals but I think they’re still available)
Also, there are a LOT of sales during Black Friday. HostHatch usually have great Black Friday deals. Keep an eye on Lowendtalk.com forums.
I’ve got a few VPSes at GreenCloudVPS (in San Jose, California) and HostHatch (in Los Angeles, California) and they’re both pretty good. I live near San Jose so I get <10ms ping to those VPSes :)
HostHatch is a bit better (their control panel is more powerful) but you’d have to wait for them have a sale, whereas GreenCloudVPS usually has good deals year-round.
I’ve used RackNerd in the past. They’re good too, although I prefer GreenCloud and HostHatch.
I wonder sometimes if the advice against pointing DNS records to your own residential IP amounts to a big scare. Like you say, if it’s just a static page served on an up to date and minimal web server, there’s less leverage for an attacker to abuse.
I’ve found that ISPs too often block port 80 and 443. Did you luck out with a decent one?
I wonder sometimes if the advice against pointing DNS records to your own residential IP amounts to a big scare. Like you say, if it’s just a static page served on an up to date and minimal web server, there’s less leverage for an attacker to abuse.
That advice is a bit old-fashioned in my opinion. There are many tools nowadays that will get you a very secure setup without much effort:
- Using a reverse proxy with automatic SSL certs like Caddy.
- Sandboxing services with Podman.
- Mitigating DoS attacks by using a WAF such as Bunkerweb.
And of course, besides all these tools, the simplest way of securing public services is to keep them updated.
I’ve found that ISPs too often block port 80 and 443. Did you luck out with a decent one?
Rogers has been my ISP for several years and have no issue receiving HTTP/S traffic. The only issue, like with most providers, is that they block port 25 (SMTP). It’s the only thing keeping me from self-hosting my own email server and have to rely on a VPS.
I have hosted a wordpress site on my unraid box before, but ended up moving it to a VPS instead. I ended up moving it primarily because a VPS is just going to have more uptime since I end up tinkering around with my homelab too often. So, any service that I expect other people to use, I often end up moving it to a VPS (mostly wikis for different things). The one exception to that is anything related to media delivery (plex, jellyfin, *arr stack), because I don’t want to make that as publicly accessible and it needs close integration with the storage array in unraid.
Good points here, uptime is a factor I had not taken into consideration. Probably better to get a vps as you say.
I have a Hugo site hosted on GitHub and I use CloudFlare Pages to put it on my custom domain. You don’t have to use GitHub to host the repo. Except for the cost of the domain, it’s free.
You don’t really need Cloudflare to have your own domain, you can do everything directly with GitHub.
I didn’t know this. Thanks for the info.
You can do the same with GitLab as another option, it supports custom domains too.
I’ve been self-hosting my blog for 21years if you can believe it, much of it has been done on a server in my house. I’ve hosted it on everything from a dusty old Pentium 200Mhz with 16MB of RAM (that’s MB, not GB!) to a shared web host (Webfaction), to a proper VPS (Hetzner), to a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster, which is where it is now.
The site is currently running Python/Django on a few Kubernetes pods on a few Raspberry Pi 4’s, so the total power consumption is tiny, and since they’re fanless, it’s all very quiet in my office upstairs.
In terms of safety, there’s always a risk since you’re opening a port to the world for someone to talk directly to software running in your home. You can mitigate that by (a) keeping your software up to date, and (b) ensuring that if you’re maintaining the software yourself (like I am) keeping on top of any dependencies that may have known exploits. Like, don’t just stand up an instance of Wordpress and forget about it. That shit’s going to get compromised :-). You should also isolate the network from the rest of your LAN if you can. Docker sort of does this for you (though I hear it can be broken out of), but a proper demarcation between your laptop and a server on the Open web is a good idea.
The safest option is probably to use a static site generator like Hugo, since then your attack surface is limited to whatever you’re using to serve the static sites (probably Nginx), while if you’re running a full-blown application that does publishing etc., then that’s a lot of stuff that could have holes you don’t know about. You may also want to setup something like Cloudflare in front of your site to prevent a DOS attack or something from crippling your home internet, though that may be overkill.
But yeah, the bandwidth requirements to running a blog are negligible, and the experience of running your own stuff on your own hardware in your own house is pretty great. I recommend it :-)
I host mine just like you want to do. Ghost running in a docker container on my homelab, with reverse proxy and domain pointing to it.
Haven’t had any issues so far.
I self host.
I use nginx as a reverse proxy with crowdsec. The backends are nginx and mariadb. Everything is running on Debian VMs or LXCs with apparmor profiles and it’s all isolated to an “untrusted” VLAN.
It’s obviously still “safer” to have someone else host your stuff, like a VPS or Github Pages, etc, but I enjoy selfhosting and I feel like I’ve mitigated most of the risk.
I self host a Wordpress site that mostly acts as my design portfolio.
It’s hosted in a Debian VM on a restricted VLAN with caddy handling SSL certificates. Uptime isn’t a huge concern for me since it’s nothing mission critical. It all sits behind a free Cloudflare proxy which allows for my home IP to be hidden.
I think as far as safety goes, I’m comfortable with this setup.
I self host my own website, blog, and a dozen privacy-friendly alternatives and front-ends to various web sites. I use a dedicated remote server for this, so nothing is on my own bare metal. netcup.de has a variety of VPS options that give you good hardware resources for your money. You can get a VPS with 8 GB of RAM, 4 core CPU, 256 GB disk, and 2.5Gbps network throughput for $6.33 a month (not including initial setup cost). Compared to what Vultr and Akamai offer for the same price, this is a steal. The company is based in Germany, so you have to convert the euro prices to US dollars if you’re in the US. The only thing about netcup.de is that your options for the location of your server are limited. They have one US location and the rest are in Europe. This is not a dealbreaker for me, though. And they guarantee 99% uptime. I’m pleased with their service. If you just want to host your personal services on a more long term basis and don’t care about scaling and deployment turnover, then netcup is great. Akamai, Digital Ocean, and Vultr are more for short term disposable, scalable VPSes or web apps and they have excellent data center availability.
My self-hosted stuff is intranet only apart from the VPN I used to access remotely. My blog is a Hugo site currently hosted on GitHub.
yes: sntx.space, check out the spurce button in the bottom right corner.
I’m building/running it the homebrewed-unconventional route. That is I have just a bit of html/css and other files I want to serve, then I use nix to build that into a usable website and serve it on one of my homelab machines via nginx. That is made available through a VPS running HA-Proxy and its public IP. The Nebula overlay network (VPN) connects the two machines.
Static site hosted by someone else for free is the way to go. I wouldn’t invite that sort of pain upon my network.
Fair point
So many suggestions here but I thought I’d chime in because I have a setup very similar to what you suggested and I found a very easy way of hosting it securely. I am using Unraid on a system in my house. I have my web service running in a docker container. I exposed it using a cloudflare tunnel. There is an Unraid plugin for cloudflare tunnels that takes out a lot of the configuration work involved in getting it running locally. You just have to also set up a corresponding endpoint on Cloudflare’s website and have a domain name registered with them for you to link to it.
The way it works then is when someone requests your domain (or subdomain) in their browser, Cloudflare gets the request and redirects the traffic to the cloudflare tunnel client app that you set up in your computer. That app on your machine then redirects the traffic to your other container that is hosting your web service and established bidirectional communication that way.
The benefits to this system are:
- Relatively easy setup, especially if you want to expose more services in the future (you’ll need to run a separate cloudflare container for each service exposed though)
- No need to open ports in your router or firewall on your home network. Cloudflare just knows how to communicate between its server and its client app on your computer (I think you have to set up an access token so it is secure).
- None of your users ever learn your home IP address because once they connect at Cloudflare’s server, they don’t get any more knowledge than that about what’s on the other side.
- It’s free (not including the cost of registering your domain)
- You don’t have to worry about changing anything if your ISP randomly changes your IP address. Hell, you could even move to a new house and take your computer with you and you wouldn’t have to reconfigure anything.
Downsides:
- You have to trust that Cloudflare is not scraping all the traffic going through the tunnel.
- Some people have a moral issue with giving Cloudflare more responsibility for hosting “the Internet”. We already rely on their infrastructure heavily for large sections of the Internet. If they ever become malicious or compromised, there is a lot to lose as a society.
I believe you can use Wireguard and a rented VPS to recreate this setup without Cloudflare but it will require a lot more knowledge in order to set it up with more points of failure. And it would cost more because even though Wireguard is FOSS, a VPS will cost you a monthly fee of at least a few bucks per month.
I currently have 2 services exposed using Cloudflare tunnels on my Unraid system at home. They’ve been running for over a year now with 0 interruption.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, really appriciate it! Learned a thing or two here :)
Nah, I host it on a web hotel.
I am using a very generic ISP and they tend to have a dim view of running servers on their network.
I did have an RPi running SSH and a Mumble server directly connected to the internet years ago, but after a few years I realized that I was bringing needless attention to my network when I found my server on Shodan.
So I took it down…
Yea depends on your website bandwidth/uptime requirements. I use a VPS running nginx and wireguard, and tunnel into that from a VM in my homelab, so no ports are open on my home firewall. nginx drops all random traffic at the VPS that isn’t destined to a preconfigured service, expected traffic is forwarded through the wireguard tunnel to the right VM’s, segregated from the rest of my home network by VLANs. I host a bit of web content where I’m not concerned with bandwidth or uptime really, as well as home assistant, file browser, a few dedicated game servers, etc.
