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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Biggest problem will be BW and latency to your lab from the Internet. I would use dedicated hardware and subnet for it. Security wise, if you can make your site 100% static it will help a lot with security. I’m personally set on AWS S3 + CloudFlare combo with static site generator running in my lab. Yes it is not really “self hosted” but worries free solution for me.
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 :)
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.
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.
This does seem like the way to go, thanks for the tips!
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.
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.
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.
could someone please point me to a “self-host-beginner-tutorial”? I had pretty good ICT-knowledge but when it comes to selfhosting my knowledge ends…
Here is one of the top of my head; https://perfectmediaserver.com/.
I’d say it boils down to what you see yourself hosting, what do you need/want? There are many great YT content creators out there documenting their experiences, tips and guides. HardwareHaven, Raid Owl, Jeff Geerling, Christian Lempa, TechnoTim and Wolfgang to mention a few.
JupiterBroadcasting has a wide variety of Podcasts dedicated to both selfhosting and linux stuff if that should peak your interest.
If you need tips for what to selfhost, here is another great resource :) https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
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.
I use a VPS and generate static sites using Hugo. Works fine.
I could host it in my network, but I don’t see a point, and I’d really rather not have a power outage or loss of internet break my site (much more likely at home than at a datacenter). I host pretty much everything else within my network though.
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.
Yes I host everything public with cloudflare tunnels. Everything more heavy is VPN with DDNS on invite basis to friends and fam. For the former it’s Hassle-free HTTPS, no reverse proxy, no firewall, no nonsense.
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.
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…
I self hosted many websites for about 20 years, but sadly I had to take it all down this year. In the process of moving to another state. Also going to really miss my 1gbps unlimited fiber connection.
I hosted my websites from windows server 2003, 2008, virtual machines, Linux, and other ways. It was fun times. I have very good up time using 2 servers and UPS battery backups.
I self-host a Ghost blog. It’s about as safe as any other service exposed to the internet.
Have some stuff on a VPS, some stuff hosted as static pages at Cloudflare, some stuff hosted at home too.
Depends on if 100% uptime is required, if they’re just serving static content, or if they’re in some way related to another service I’m running (I have a couple of BBSes, and the web pages that host the clients and VMs that host the clients run locally).
Though, at this point, anything I’m NOT hosting at home is kinda a “legacy” deployment, and probably will be brought in-house at some point in the future or converted to static-only and put on Cloudflare if there’s some reason I can’t/don’t want to host it at home.
