Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.
Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it's a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.
That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being "install your updates". And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it's running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.
The process generally looks something like:
Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you're willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.
Good luck, and in case I didn't mention it, install your updates.
All great advise, but you missed pray that you're not the target of some 0 day exploit.
No, but you are the target of bots scanning for known exploits. The time between an exploit being announced and threat actors adding it to commodity bot kits is incredibly short these days. I work in Incident Response and seeing
wp-contentin the URL of an attack is nearly a daily occurrence. Sure, for whatever random software you have running on your normal PC, it's probably less of an issue. Once you open a system up to the internet and constant scanning and attack by commodity malware, falling out of date quickly opens your system to exploit.You make good points here for the beginner however there are better alternatives and solutions for basically everything you mentioned here. The biggest I want to address is conflicts on your system. Generally running servers on metal is just outright bad practice. Containerize. Always containerize. There are lots of great options. Docker, podman, Lxc, helm, flatpak.. hell. Snap if you must. Running servers on metal is generally is just asking for trouble unless the system’s entire purpose is for that. Also the cg-nat situation. Personally been behind it for a few years but it’s not a problem as long as you have a reverse proxy tunnel in place. Not a hard fix at all.
I do agree with what you are saying, but for a complete beginner, and a very general overview, I didn't want to complicate things too much. I personally run my own stuff in containers and am behind CG-NAT (it's why I gave it a mention).
That said, if you really wanted to give the new user that advice, go for it. Rather than just nit pick and do the "but actshuly" bit, start adding that info and point out how the person should do it and what to consider. Build, instead of just tearing down.