I am making a series of blog posts about website and application hosting. There are many topics I’d like to talk about (IP, DNS, logs, linux settings). I am sharing here some knowledge and documenting for myself too.
This first post is not the most interesting in my opinion as this is talking about the basis : hardware and Linux distribution. I am not talking about non-Linux OS (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc). For the next one I will document way more commands and process to go through (iptable, fail2ban, logs on memory, etc).
I don’t consider myself good at writing so any help is welcome, I try to put as many images/charts as possible but this one is tricky. Feedbacks are welcome.
I’d be interested in a networking section. My biggest hurdle in self-hosting is that my ISP uses CG/NAT, so no port forwarding. This has made even simple applications difficult to set up. It seems the easiest workaround is to set them up through a domain, which I’ve tried and had no luck with. A mix of not my forte and there being few straightforward guides.
Next part is going to be security and some storage off-loading on memory (mostly avoiding logs on storage). Then probably a part 3 on server stack (nginx/apache) and network.
I never encounter this CG/NAT, I’m wondering how it goes with online game for instance (wouldn’t it be a no-go for many casual users?). I have set-up once a VPN as a reverse-proxy, buying the lowest tiers of VPS (Virtual Private Server) as it would had a public IP to use and just forward everything to the server (which was in a shared space so kind of the same as CG/NAT). This is not 100% host but at least the VPS is just a gateway and doesn’t hold anything and is easily replaceable.
I’m wondering how it goes with online game for instance (wouldn’t it be a no-go for many casual users?
I’ve wondered the same honestly. I’m able to connect to servers, never been an issue, but if I want to host my own game server it’s only available locally and no ports are ever exposed (understandably, since they don’t exist lol). Been a real hassle that’s for sure!
cloudflare tunnel?
I did attempt it a bit but I was having issues. Definitely the way I’m trying to go though!