I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
On a certain level, most of those things don’t matter.
Yes, reverse proxying and being able to point a domain is nice
A VPN more secure
Cloudflare (either tunnels, DNS, or DDoS protection) is also good
You can always do better with more “best practices” but if you want to stream a movie to some friends? Throwing up a server, opening a port and providing an IP just works as well. The better you get the more fancy you will be.
Its very much a tinkering hobby. Find a reason you want to tinker, and if you enjoy the tinkering you will keep up with it. My current dashboard points to a direct IP. Most of my services are reverse proxied but for some reason I can’t get CORS to work well with dashy. At some point I’ll get around to fixing it, but it gets the job done now.