What is the current state of home hosting?
I've been running a VPS for about 20 years now. The internet situation at home has been pretty crappy for most of that time so I never really ran a setup at home. A few Pis running some services and that is all.
Now that I have xfinity's gig fiber with unlimited bandwidth for the next 6 years, I'm wondering what the current state of self hosting at home is. Way back when if you had the ports for Postfix open you'd get a call from your ISP saying stop hosting services. I don't get much traffic, but I want to keep my own email, a few small webpages and my smolweb services.
Jul 15 · 3 months ago · 👍 hyperreal
11 Comments ↓
All depends on your ISP, I self host from home and have a static IP and my ISP is happy for me to do whatever as long as complaints aren’t raised. I had dual fibre lines with two static ip’s for a while but cut back to save money. If you have options you can look around for a “cool” ISP. Been hosting from home forever.
👾 jecxjo [OP] · Jul 15 at 16:53:
I just looked and it seems like the cost for a static IP is the same price as my monthly VPS cost. I wouldn't care having down time but I have one website I host for someone else and I have email accounts that I don't want to have to deal with IP renewals making the service unavailable.
🚀 SavaRocks · Jul 15 at 17:39:
hosting from home as well.
gemini://sava.rocks
gopher://sava.rocks
finger://sava.rocks
https://sava.rocks
hosting from home. ISP: Vodafone Romania
Haven't had any issues
re the cost vs. VPS. I don’t do it to save money, granted if it was a fortune I might not. I do it to decentralize the internet. And really own what I run. Even a VPS tends to be a bit of a hub and there’s a degree of letting go.
further on static IP, if you aren’t doing something like email, you can go far with a dynamic ip and one of the many dynamic IP providers that will give you a subdomain.
I do not have a static IP address; it is a dynamic IP address but it rarely changes. I use my own server for receiving email but I use the ISP's server for sending. I do have stuff other than email as well, but the server does not currently implement TLS (although I may add it in future, especially if I decide to implement user authentication).
As for email, why not run your own, free of charge, email infrastructure for family, friends and co-workers?
https://tilde.club/~pollux/
🚀 SavaRocks · Jul 16 at 05:50:
I wanna setup https://www.xmox.nl/
looks like it's easy and also has a web interface for administration and email
But this requires a Domain etc.
I used this “wizard” for ~5 years without issue, ran primary/backup in different countries
— https://github.com/vedetta-com/caesonia
And you can use something like duckdns for a domain
👾 jecxjo [OP] · Jul 18 at 18:11:
I already own half a dozen domains, the vps is setup for web, email, a few gemini caps, caldav, doc share, git repos, and more. it would make sense to self host. I'll have to see what I can do about the IP.
I use iRedMail the past few years and it works well.
☕️ hyperreal · Jul 20 at 04:15:
I self-host all my services at home. If you don't want your private services (e.g. Nextcloud, FreshRSS, IRC) to be public-facing, I highly recommend using Tailscale to setup a private mesh network for each device. I run these private services in DietPi on a SBC. I setup ACLs in Tailscale.
My public-facing web services are on a separate device, which is accessible from the public internet by enabling port forwarding on ports 22, 80, 443, and 1965. Comcast's IDS/IPS and firewall is still active. Fail2ban doesn't show thousands of suspicious brute-force SSH login attempts like it does on a VPS.
Source