I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.
Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.
I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can’t communicate with each other.
I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don’t anticipate a crush of people.
I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I’ve successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.
I’m not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that’s it.
Anything else I should know? Thanks!
EDIT:
I also have a domain, a couple of them, actually. They’re like potato chips; you can’t stop at just one.
I don’t plan on self-hosting email used for forum registration and announcements. I’m not a masochist.
EDIT for future readers:
I think for now I’m not going to self host anything I intend to be accessed by the public. While I pay the internet bill, my name is on the account, and I own all the equipment, I’m not the only member of this household, so it would be somewhat inconsiderate of me to share our bandwidth with public traffic. In general I think those warning against self-hosting resources one intends to be accessed by the general public are pretty sound.
I tried the Cloudflare tunnel suggestion, but it doesn’t seem to play nice with NodeBB. I can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but I can’t log in. Some quick googling leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets. The first fix I found involves exposing my IP, which defeats the purpose of using a cloudflare tunnel. There may be a way around it, but I frankly can’t be bothered.
Its so cheap to just get a vps from a littlecreekhosting deal, I checked them all on lowendtalk and its the cheapest for highest specs, you do have to comment your invoice to double ram, but its 4 core 8gb ram for 3.50 a month and 8core 16gb 7$ cogent amd epyc, and solid ssd space 140-160 idr exactly, they have multiple deals posted, the one with the prices I mention is the best one, they also had windows vps deals. Spent way too long testing hella, its not the best ping out there for me since I’m fairly far but I’m not hosting gameservers so its a non issue.
There are many other deals on lowendtalk but they are typically for way less resources or way more expensive for a lot more resources
OP asks for not doing exactly that though.
its just way less risky and not that expensive tho? I had the same idea as op til I realized that fit my needs and gave a lot more resources than hetzner.
This site seems suspicious as hell. Incredibly basic site, no info on where they’re located, and the “About Us” links aren’t even links. There’s no About Us page.
its one of the more trusted ones on lowendtalk? nicer site doesnt equal better company and typically equals worse deals, a lot of the nicer looking sites on lowendtalk have had comment saying they are scams
No, I didn’t say this “isn’t a nice site”. I said it’s “suspicious as hell”.
Having a working site and a navigable “About Us” page isn’t “nice”. It’s the bare minimum I would expect of any legitimate nice or ugly site.
There’s just a lot on their site that reeks of sloppy scammers.
either waymy suggestion was to find a deal that suits your needs at low end talk over trying to self host anything otherppl will be accessing from your home, you wont find good deals just googling around, or even on reddit
but thats the exact issue, the businesses with clean perfect sites tend to be the scams, while these where you need specific links off a forum like lownendtalm to even access the deal work well and are hella cheap in comparison? Racknerds also been great but way less resources, their deals also never go away if you get a link.
Three incoherent replies with jumbled run-on sentences.
Uhhh, no. Objectively no. A legit website is not going to have spelling mistakes and broken links. Looking professional and thorough is a direct lead to increased business. What you just said is completely false, and frankly idiotic.
Everything else you said (in all three replies) is just a jumbled mess of a brain dump that I’m not even going to try and address any of it.
well, i have a lot of stuff running on it fine for the last 3 months, and lowendtalk is what I trust, I made a thread there asking about it and ppl trusted them.
You use a virtualizer panel and they provision from cogent, its pretty straightforward what you’re getting and you can stress test it or whatever? Do you only trust the major players like digital ocean, aws, etc.?
I’ve had good luck with these guys: https://cloudfanatic.net/pricing/
I think they would fall in the less resources category. But they offer unlimited data transfer, and you can use any distro you want. I run slackware btw.
Ill check them out, been curious about unlimited data transfer, does it allow torrenting done through their hosting