I have played around with yunohost and other similar tools. I know how to open ports on router, configure port forwarding. I am also interested on hosting my own stuff for experiments, but I also have a VPN enabled for privacy reasons on my router at all times. If you haven’t guessed already, I am very reserved on revealing my home IP for selfhosting, as contradictory as it sounds.
I am aware that it’s better to rent a VPS, not to mention the dynamic IP issues, but here it goes: assuming my VPN provider permits port forwarding, is it possible to selfhost anything from behind a VPN, including the virtual machine running all the necessary softwares?
edit: title
edit2: I just realized my VPN provider is discontinuing port forwarding next month. Why?!
What hardware do you run on? Or do you use a data center/cloud?
I have 2 home servers - an Intel NUC (8GB RAM, 8.1TB storage) running Ubuntu and a Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS. The NUC is my main server and the rpi is a dedicated wireguard/pivpn.
Do you use containers or plain packages?
On the main server I use docker containers almost exclusively. I find them easier to stand up and tear down, particularly using scripts, without worrying about the broader OS.
I have the following services on the NUC -
I did play around with my own Lemmy instance but that was not successful and I found beehaw :-)
Orchestration tools like K8s or Docker Swarm?
docker-compose for most services although I don’t really like to orchestrate outside what is necessary (eg. nextcloud app and db).
How do you handle logs?
Badly. I lost a server due to root filling up a couple years back. Now I monitor disk space (see below) and prune logs as required.
How about updates?
OS updates I push daily. I don’t regularly update my docker containers. I did use Watchtower for a while but found it broke stuff a little too often.
Do you have any monitoring tools you love?
Just some custom batch scripts (disk space, backups etc) which send me regular emails. I also have conky running on a small screen 24x7