I just started renting a basic VPS through Racknerd with the intent to use it as a reverse proxy to point friends to my game server instances running at home without exposing my public IP. I could not figure out how to get it to work so I gave up after days of trying and am now using playit.gg. I prepaid for a year of the VPS. What cool project should I try on it now?
An option which covers a bunch of different experiments: set up PiHole on it (despite the name, it doesn’t need to be run on a raspberry pi) then set up a persistent VPN, for eg wireguard, or whatever your router supports VPN to it from where you are, and then setup your router to use it as your DNS server for your vlan.
Its a relatively simple set of tasks, but they build a good grounding for anything else you end up wanting to run on it.
Does that introduce any latency? I think the VPS is in CA and I’m in PNW, so somewhat close. I did have pi-hole running locally until just recently. I’ve switched to Adguard Home instead. I have primary DNS on the pi and secondary on my unRAID server.
It might. But anecdotally, I have three instances of Adguard Home that my router uses, one local and two VPS. The fastest is on a VPS, ~7ms average processing time. My local instance is in the teens, probably because I’m abusing that poor machine hosting too much. But a VPS based DNS server is a viable option in my personal experience.