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!

  • Nealiumj@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    As a computer science student you should know: just break it down into small chunks.

    1. Get service to run locally (IP / port)
    2. port forwarding, access remotely
    3. Set up a free DuckDNS domain, Lets Encrypt, use for a bit
    4. Buy a cloudflare domain, set up dynamic dns, Lets Encrypt (again), swap away from DuckDNS
    5. Set up Nginx reverse proxy, port forward to that instead, proxy to service’s internal IP + port
    6. Run more things!

    That’s generally what I did… I’ve been self hosting for about a year now and I’ve got 6 services going now… once you get going, it’s quite easy!