Comment by messo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by messo | Hacker News Reader

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Hosting a personal blog on old / cheap hardware at home and accepting some downtime now and then should be a trade-of worth making for most. An interconnected web of documents served from personal computers residing under a desk or in a basement – it is a beautiful thing.

We nerds often seem to fall into the trap of over-engineering things, like, spending a lot of time building personal stuff that can scale into the infinity – only to end up never having more than 10 concurrent visitors at any given time.

By accepting and embracing the intermittent and slightly unstable nature of serving websites from our homes, we can take back much of the in(ter)dependence and hacky, quirky fun that many of us fondly remember from the 90's and 2000's.

Setting up a webserver on a Pi and serving it from home can be a fun project, not necessarily trivial for everyone, but definitely within reach for most technically inclined people.

Might be among the cheapest, easiest AND fun ways to host a static site :)

Adding to this: If you want/need to mask your residential IP, still want access over clearnet, and have e.g. a VPS with a public IP that can front the traffic, the easiest while still robust way I found to do this is to set up a Wireguard VPN and use either microsocks+proxychains, or vopono.

Bonus that this works even if your server is behind some DMZ or bastion without having to open up the mothership.

(For the use-case of a public personal static site this probably doesn't make much sense; you could just publish to the VPS in the first place. But if you have server-side stuff you must or want to run locally for whatever reason, this is way more straightforward to get right than manually fiddling with iptables, using some SSH tunnel, or setting up redundant reverse proxies)

I have hosted all my websites on a server at home since 1993 until 2021. I never had any downtime or problems. I ran a ISP and datacenter from my home for a decade as well. Nowadays I have a $2 per month VPS to forward a static IP at 1 Gbps to both my home servers and a failover server at a friends home. Works fine up to 600 Mbps sustained web traffic. Its been cheaper than colocation of dedicated servers and much cheaper than hosting in the cloud.

How does one run an ISP at one's house? Wouldn't you need access to a backbone or peering agreements?

In 1990 I started the first ISP in the Netherlands, I had a dialup modem bank in a spare room after I installed the first hundred phone lines from the trunk line across the street. My backbone was upgraded to a 2 Mbps custom modem to the rail way station nearby. From there we had 2 Mbps modems at every rail way station from Utrecht to Amsterdam and eventually all the way across the country up to Groningen.

I upgraded to a fiber optic line around 1996 straight to the first free internet exchange in the world in Amsterdam, that we started ourselves. There we peered and had transit fibers.

Now I'm laying my own fiber backbone and house to house power router network [1] starting at many internet exchanges (one per country). We combine that with HVDC electricity backbones interconnecting solar and wind to build the first community owned Enernet with 10-80 Gbps internet.

Join us to start Enernet in your neighbourhood and give the internet back to the endusers while also saving each household over $2000 in heating and electricity bills per year.

[1] https://www.academia.edu/download/51128325/Fiberhood_white_p...

I am doing this and it's fun! The only hassles I had are a. setting up DDNS (since I don't have a static IP) and b. getting a certificate from Let's encrypt with only port 443 open (80 is blocked by my ISP). But other than that, it has been great! Hopefully my ISP won't have a problem with that ;)

I just use a script on a cron that runs every 15 minutes and updates my DNS provider. And for let’s encrypt, I use the DNS verification method so you don’t have to even expose HTTP(S) ports if you don’t need to

I wrote a small go app[0] which is invoked every 15 minutes and updates the DNS through the cloudflare API. Its very specific for my use case and ISP but works well.

[0] https://gitlab.com/dominikstraessle/homelab-dns

Cool! There's also certbot[0] and lego[1] which can do ACME-DNS with a range of providers beside CF. You could also do tls-alpn, which allows you to do do the challenger encrypted on another port. Sounds like DNS works fine for you, but it's primarily worth considering for those issuing certs for non-public names that shouldn't be broadcasted via public DNS.

[0]: https://github.com/certbot/certbot

[1]: https://github.com/go-acme/lego

I'll go one step further: were it not for self-hosting since the early 2000s, I probably wouldn't have a career. My first "server" was a Pentium laptop with no screen. Now I run thousands of servers for a company you've probably heard of.

I’m going to believe those thousands of sites are still on the Pentium laptop.

https://xkcd.com/908/

Definitely cool, but personally, I’d rather not open any inbound holes into my home network, no matter how secure I may think it is.

This can be solved by having a separate VLAN for services that are exposed to the internet.

Don't a bunch of residential ISP's not allow HTTP?

Yes but just in the land of the Free.

I must contradict this. Virgin Media (a large UK ISP), as well as other service providers, see running a web server on a residential Internet connection a violation of the Terms of Service.

(Unless I misunderstood your point.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/8cfwmi/any_uk_p...

Source? I've never heard of this in the US or in other countries I've been in, although I wouldn't doubt it's the case somewhere.

Every major ISP I've used has disallowed hosting websites since about 2002 or so when Comcast, my provider at the time, changed their policy.

Same here! I'm working on a small site for pentesting / CTF commands. Like a cheat sheet but interactive so you have to copy and change less code during my day. It's entirely static so any nginx server just caches all the responses. A simple NUC does the trick.

Put the free Cloudflare proxy in front just to speed it up a little.

That's how I do it. I absolutely agree with the overengineering. I'm pretty confident my low-end Celeron server could handle a large number of concurrent visitors over my fiber connection at home.

It's been getting more difficult to host any kind of services at home. My current home internet service is behind triple NAT.

I host at home but put a VPS in front of it. Then I use wireguard to route all the connections to my home server. Which goes right thru all that NAT.

I can 'upgrade' to a fixed, routable IP for ~$5/month.

If I switched to a different ISP, I used to be able to get a fixed IP for a one-time $40 fee. I think that offer is no longer available though.

Doing this (not a blog but a game of freeciv) is how I got into coding as a career instead of coding as a hobby.

I do the same thing. The only problem I have is with my mail server. Any email that comes from my dynamic IP address auto goes to junk for everyone. I send probably one every two weeks for password resets.

Setup dynamic dns , and point your spf to that

I wonder if 3rd parties could DOS the telephone (VoIP) this way?

Do you take precautions or just accept the theoretically lower reliability of the phone – which isn't anything reliable anymore anyway, thanks to VoIP?

I do not currently have a VoIP telephone, but don't think it would be an immediate worry as I have a 500/500 fiber connection.

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