Hi everyone, first time posting since the Reddit went nuclear on sanity. With the advent of Lemmy, I finally got around to booting my home-server back up and stood up my own instance :)

How do you all self host stuff? I’ve been happily running Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Plex, etc locally, but none of that has been internet facing. As I’m getting back into this I want to share stuff with my friends and family and getting them all to use a VPN seems like a stretch.

Wondering if the general consensus is that it’s better to put shit on a VPS, on your own HW locally (with firewalls, safeguards, etc) or some combo of the two?

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Things that I need to be internet facing run on an actual server, most of my stuff is hosted on a laptop in my living room and I use tailscale to access it from outside the house, but I mostly consider that a plus and wouldn’t depend on it.

    • NewDataEngineer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I second this. I only access anything internet facing via tailscale.

      The only question I have now, is how do I let family and friends access certain services without tailscale?

      I’m thinking a vps with something like authelia in the front that tunnels into my server via tailscale.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I just give them access through tailscale, but then again I don’t have many people who need access to what I host.

    • Nick@nickbuilds.netOP
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      1 year ago

      Gotcha, yeah this is running on a set of boxes that I’ve been using as my homelab for a few years. Some of those have graduated to homeprod and that’s where I’m getting stuck. I want to share Plex and the like with my family who are 2500 miles away.

      Definitely would setup tailscale or a VPN between the houses if I was closer. At this distance, maintenance would be a nightmare even though my dad and brothers are very tech savvy.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I live in Ireland, I have family in Brazil that access my server via tailscale. It’s not the best experience, but I think it’s the best I can do with a home hosted server. Exposing stuff to the full internet is a security nightmare.