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.
DDOS against a little self hosted instance isn’t really a concern I’d have. I’d be more concerned with the scraping of private information, ransomware, password compromises, things of that nature. If you keep your edge devices on the latest security patches and you are cognizant on what you are exposing and how, you’ll be fine.
I feel like you have the wrong idea of what hacking acting a actually is… But yes, as long as you don’t do anything too stupid line forwarding all of your ports or going without any sort of firewall, the chances of you getting hacked are very low…
As for DDOSing, you can get DDOSed with or without self hosting all the same, but I wouldn’t worry about it.
A VPS with fail2ban is all you need really. Oh and don’t make ssh accounts where the username is the password. That’s what I did once, but the hackers were nice, they closed the hole and then just used it to run a irc client because the network and host was so stable.
Found out by accident, too bad they left their irc username and pw in cleartext. Was a fun week or so messing around with their channels
Talk about a reverse UNO card.
Why would anyone ddos you? Ddos costs money andor effort. Noone is going to waste that on you. Maybe dos but not ddos. And the troll will go away after some time as well. There’s no gain in dosing you. Why would anyone hack your static website? For the lulz? If everything is https encrypted on your local net how does a hacker infest everything on your network?
I host a handful of Internet facing sites/applications from my NAS and have had no issues. Just make sure you know how to configure your firewall correctly and you’ll be fine.
Other than the low chance of you being targeted I would say only expose your services through something like Wireguard. Other than the port being open attackers won’t know what it’s for. Wireguard doesn’t respond if you don’t immediately authenticate.
Firewall, Auth on all services, diligent monitoring, network segmentation (vlans are fine), and don’t leave any open communications ports, and you’ll be fine.
Further steps would be intrusion detecting/banning like crowdsec for whatever apps leave world accessible. Maybe think about running a BSD host and using jails.
Use a firewall like OPNsense and you’ll be fine. There’s a Crowdsec plugin to help against malicious actors, and for the most part, nothing you’re doing is worth the trouble to them.
You can simply set up a VPN for your home network (e.g. Tailscale, Netbird, Headscale, etc.) and you won’t have to worry about attacks. Public services require a little more work, you will need to rely on a service from a company, either a tunnel (e.g. Tailscale funnel) or a VPS.
mmm netbird seems cool, any experience with it?
No, I’m currently using Tailscale but have been considering switching to Netbird to not be reliant on Tailscale.
If you are behind CGNAT and use some tunnel (Wireguard, Tailscale, etc.) to access your services which are running on Docker containers, the attack vector is almost not existing.
Of course security comes with layers, and if you’re not comfortable hosting services publically, use a VPN.
However, 3 simple rules go a long way:
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Treat any machine or service on a local network as if they were publically accesible. That will prevent you from accidentally leaving the auth off, or leaving the weak/default passwords in place.
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Install services in a way that they are easy to patch. For example, prefer phpmyadmin from debian repo instead of just copy pasting the latest official release in the www folder. If you absolutely need the latest release, try a container maintained by a reasonable adult. (No offense to the handful of kids I’ve known providing a solid code, knowledge and bugreports for the general public!)
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Use unattended-upgrades, or an alternative auto update mechanism on rhel based distros, if you don’t want to become a fulltime sysadmin. The increased security is absolutely worth the very occasional breakage.
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You and your hardware are your worst enemies. There are tons of giudes on what a proper backup should look like, but don’t let that discourage you. Some backup is always better than NO backup. Even if it’s just a copy of critical files on an external usb drive. You can always go crazy later, and use snapshotting abilities of your filesystem (btrfs, zfs), build a separate backupserver, move it to a different physical location… sky really is the limit here.
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This is nonsense. A small static website is not going to be hacked or DDOSd. You can run it off a cheap ARM single board computer on your desk, no problem at all.
What?
I’ve popped up a web server and within a day had so many hits on the router (thousands per minute) that performance tanked.
Yea, no, any exposed service will get hammered. Frankly I’m surprised that machine I setup didn’t get hacked.
Don’t leave SSH on port 22 open as there are a lot of crawlers for that, otherwise I really can’t say I share your experience, and I have been self-hosting for years.
Am I missing something? Why would anyone leave SSH open outside the internal network?
All of my services have SSH disabled unless I need to do something, and then I only do it locally, and disable as soon as I’m done.
Note that I don’t have a VPS anywhere.
Some people want to be able to reach their server via SSH when they are not at home, but yes I agree in general that is not necessary when running a real home server.
Then use Wireguard to get into your local network. Simple as. All security risks that don’t need to be accessed by the public (document servers, ssh, internal tools, etc…) can be accessed via VPN while the port forwarded servers are behind a reverse proxy, TLS, and an authentication layer like Authelia/authentik for things that only a small group needs to access.
Sorry, but there is 1 case in 10000 where a home user would have to have publicly exposed SSH and 9999 cases of 10000 where it is not needed at all and would only be done out of laziness or lack of knowledge of options.
Yeah na, put your home services in Tailscale, and for your VPS services set up the firewall for HTTP, HTTPS and SSH only, no root login, use keys, and run fail2ban to make hacking your SSH expensive. You’re a much smaller target than you think - really it’s just bots knocking on your door and they don’t have a profit motive for a DDOS.
From your description, I’d have the website on a VPS, and Immich at home behind TailScale. Job’s a goodun.
Just changing the SSH port to non standard port would greatly reduce that risk. Disable root login and password login, use VLANs and containers whenever possible, update your services regularly and you will be mostly fine
Drink less paranoia smoothie…
I’ve been self-hosting for almost a decade now; never bothered with any of the giants. Just a domain pointed at me, and an open port or two. Never had an issue.
Don’t expose anything you don’t share with others; monitor the things you do expose with tools like fail2ban. VPN into the LAN for access to everything else.
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.)
