Is it practically impossible for a newcomer selfhost without using centralised services, and get DDOSed or hacked?

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.

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.)

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.

DDoS and hacking are like taxes: you should be so lucky as to have to worry about them, because that means you're wildly successful. Worry about getting there first because that's the hard part.

Use any old computer you have lying around as a server. Use Tailscale to connect to it, and don’t open any ports in your home firewall. Congrats, you’re self-hosting and your risk is minimal.

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.

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.

The DDOSED hype on this site is so over played. Oh my god my little self hosted services are going to get attacked. Is it technically possible yes but it hasn’t been my experience.

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

Getting DDOSed or hacked is very very rare for anyone self hosting. DDOS doesn't really happen to random people hosting a few small services, and hacking is also rare because it requires that you expose something with a significant enough vulnerability that someone has a way into the application and potentially the server behind it.

But it's good to take some basic steps like an isolated VLAN as you've mentioned already, but also don't expose services unless you need to. Immich for example if it's just you using it will work just fine without being exposed to the internet.

Self hosting can save a lot of money compared to Google or aws. Also, self hosting doesn't make you vulnerable to DDOS, you can be DDOSed even without a home server.

You don't need VLANs to keep your network secure, but you should make sure than any self hosted service isn't unnecessarily opens up tot he internet, and make sure that all your services are up to date.

What services are you planning to run? I could help suggest a threat model and security policy.

You can. I am lucky enough to not have been hacked after about a year of this, and I use a server in the living room. There are plenty of guides online for securing a server. Use common sense, and also look up threat modeling. You can also start hosting things locally and only host to the interwebs once you learn a little more. Basically, the idea that you need cloudflare and aws to not get hacked is because of misleading marketing.

Hey no to be harsh or anything but did you actually made your research? Plenty of people self host websites on their house without AWS , Google or Cloudfare and it works fine.

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?

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.

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.

It’s very possible. If you carefully manage your attack surface and update your software regularly, you can mitigate your security risks quite a bit.

The main problem is going to be email. I have found no reliable way to send email that does not start with “have someone else do it for you” or “obtain an IP block delegation”.

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.

I have servers on Digital Ocean and Linode and also one in my basement, and have had no problem. I do have all services behind NPM (not to suggest it's a panacea) and use HTTPS/SSH for everything. (not to suggest HTTPS/SSH are either) My use case could be different than yours - my immediate family are my only consumers - but have been running the same services in those locations for a few years now without issue.

If you are afraid of being ddosed which is very unlikely. Cloudflare has free ddos protection. You can put some but not all things behind their proxy.

Also instead of making things publicly available look in to using a VPN. Wireguard with "wireguard easy" makes this very simple.

VLANs do not make you network magically more secure. But when setup correctly can increase security a load if something has already penetrated the network. But also just to streamline a network and allow or deny some parts of the network.

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.

If your needs are fairly low on the processing side, you can snag a cloud VPS on LowEndBox for five or six dollars a month. Quality is highly variable ofc, but I’m reasonably my happy with mine.

No AWS, etc (though I don’t know offhand where the actual box lives), SSH access defaults to a key, and the rest (firewall, reverse proxy if you like, and all the other best practices) are but an apt-get away and a quick searxng to find and dissect working configs.

Incidentally, searxng is a good place to start- dead easy to get rolling,and a big step towards degoogling your life. Stand it up, throw a pretty standard config at nginx, and do a certbot —nginx -d search.mydomain.com - that all there is to it.

YMMV with more complex apps,but there is plenty of help to be had.

Oh…. Decide early on if anonymity is a goal,or you’re ok tying real life identity to your server if someone cares to look. Register domains and make public facing choices accordingly.

Either choice is acceptable if it’s the right one for you, but it’s hard to change once you pick a path.

I’m a big fan of not hosting on prem simply because it’s one more set of cables to trip over, etc. But for a latte a month in hosting costs, it’s worth it to me.

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.

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.

I've self hosted home assistant for a few years, external access through Cloud flare now because it's been so stablez but previously used DuckDNS which was a bit shit if I'm honest.

I got into self hosting proper earlier this year, I wanted to make something that I could sail the 7 seas with.

I use Tailscale for everything.

The only open port on my router is for Plex because I'm a socialist and like to share my work with my friends.

Just keep it all local and use it at home. If you wanna take some of your media outside with you, download it onto your phone before you leave

If your SSH is using key authentication and you don't have anything silly as an attack vector, you should be grand.

If you do it right you shouldn't get hacked. Even if you do you can keep good immutable backups so you can restore. Also make sure you monitor everything for bad behavior or red flags.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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!)

3. 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.

4. 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.

It depends on what your level of confidence and paranoia is. Things on the Internet get scanned constantly, I actually get routine reports from one of them that I noticed in the logs and hit them up via an associated website. Just take it as an expected that someone out there is going to try and see if admin/password gets into some login screen if it's facing the web.

For the most part, so long as you keep things updated and use reputable and maintained software for your system the larger risk is going to come from someone clicking a link in the wrong email than from someone haxxoring in from the public internet.

Not my experience so far with my single service I've been running for a year. It's making me even think of opening up even more stuff.

I've been self hosting for 2 or 3 years and haven't been hacked, though I fully expect it to happen eventually(especially if I start posting my blog in places). I'd suggest self hosting a VPN to get into your home network and not making your apps accessible via the internet unless 100% necessary. I also use docker containers to minimize the apps access to my full system. Best of luck!

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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

13 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

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It is easy to get hacked if you make stupid mistakes. Just don't make them.