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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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A few questions about selfhosting from a newbie (self.selfhosted)

submitted 1 year ago by SniffBark to c/selfhosted

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Hi, I recently acquired a pretty solid VPS for a good price, and right now I use it to run Caddy for two personal sites. When I moved to Lemmy I found about this awesome community and it got me really interested in selfhosting. I won’t be asking for tips on what to selfhost (but feel free to add what you use), there’s a lot of posts about it to look through, but I was wondering: how are you accessing your selfhosted stuff? I would love to have some sort of dashboard with monitoring and statuses of all my services, so should I just setup WireGuard and then access everything locally? I wanted to have it behind a domain, how would I achieve it? E.g. my public site would be at example.com and my dashboard behind dash.example.com, but only accessible locally through a VPN.

I started to learn Docker when setting up my Caddy server, so I’m still really new to this stuff. Are there any major no-no things a newbie might do with Docker/selfhosting that I should avoid?

I’m really looking forward to setting everything up once I have it planned out, that’s the most fun part for me, the troubleshooting and fixing all the small errors and stuff. So, thank you for your help and ideas, I can share my setup when it’s done.

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[–] daFRAKKINpope 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I host in the way that you describe: "service.domain.com". I use Cloudflare, docker, and Caddy.

I don't remember any pit falls off the top of my head. Make sure to use HTTPS (port 443). Everything on http is basically open for everyone to see. Caddy should set that up for you automatically, tho. I recently moved to Caddy from Traefik, it's an awesome tool.

Oh, here's a pitfall. One time I opened a port, #22, for ssh access to my server. I installed fail2ban on my server. One weekend I looked at my logs and found I'd banned hundreds of IP addresses. Some bot found my open port and then begun attacking the login with some kinda rainbow table. I moved the port from the ssh default to something else and never had a problem since.

Also, and this isn't a requirement but just useful, I set up a VLAN for my selfhosted server. It's firewalled from my local network. That way, if someone access' my server they don't have access to my whole network.

So, tldr, have fun and midigate risk where you can.

[–] SniffBark 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I love Caddy so much. I’ve only ever used Nginx before, and it was a pain to configure. With Caddy, it’s just a few lines, and the automatic HTTPS is very nice.

Thanks for the SSH port tip, I’ve disabled password auth on all my servers before and only used key auth, but I will move the port to something other for extra security.