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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

I've never run into trouble running stuff from home. SMTP from home is always going to be problematic, though.

The lack of IPv4 address space has started a trend of CGNAT which makes hosting from home nearly impossible. Luckily, IPv6 continues to be rolled out, but in many situations thst would lead to your services only being reachable through IPv6. There are still a great many outdated networks out there that can't reach IPv6, so you might run into trouble there.

If you can get a public IPv4 IP address, I see no reason why you'd run into issues. That's more of an ISP problem than a hosting problem, in my opinion.

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I -- along with many other mail server operators -- block dynamic IP space. Which is almost the same as blocking home users, but not quite -- I have a static /29 on my residential package and ran my mail server from the slow side of an ADSL connection for several years.

> SMTP from home is always going to be problematic, though

If your IP is not dynamic, and you can configure the reverse DNS, there's not going to be problems :)

Except with Gmail and Outlook of course, but well these are the problems, not us.

Most, if not all, residential IP blocks are in the various blacklists most mail servers query. Merely having a reverse PTR won't get your email delivered. Even SPF and DKIM with DMARC probably won't be enough to get over the blacklist rating.

Some business IP blocks aren't blocked, though, so in rare cases you might get away with running a mail server from a business internet subscription.

> Even SPF and DKIM with DMARC probably won't be enough to get over the blacklist rating.

I can confirm this. I recently tried to set up being able to send emails from an smtp server in my homelab to my gmail address. Even with all the good stuff - a domain, tls, spf, dkim, dmarc, gmail just straight up refuses to receive mail from residential IPs. I ended up proxying it through my VPS, which works better but still requires me setting up gmail rules to NEVER send messages from my special domain to spam. Which it would otherwise do for no apparent reason sometimes.

In general using IPv6 reverse proxied by something like CF is the optimal solution to most problems.

If you're going the Cloudflare route, then just get a cheap VPS somewhere and run off that instead. Gets you both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, and you can always proxy stuff yourself if you need to access local hardware.

It's a solution, but it's hardly the home server project you could (and should be able to) run from your home internet.

If you're going to rely on cloudflare, who control access to a huge number of sites and explicitly choose to cut off some of them for political reasons, why even bother hosting something yourself? At that point you might as well be posting on facebook.

most ISPs in Australia offer a static IPv4 for a monthly fee ($5 to $10 a month).

That's an ISP problem, though. For that price it's better to just rent a VPS for hosting/proxying traffic. A wireguard tunnel to your actual home server and an nginx proxy at a $4 VPS provide more options than just a guaranteed static IP. Hell, if you can nab some capacity, you can use free VPS solutions like the one AWS and Google provide for a year, or the one Oracle providers forever if you can live with the 50mbps uplink (you get 2 servers so maybe you could tunnel that into 100mbps?) and the annoying Web UI for setting them up.

Luckily, you don't need a static IP address in most use cases if you set up dyndns, as long as the IP is exclusively used by you and doesn't change too often (e.g. every week or month or so).

> For that price it's better to just rent a VPS for hosting/proxying traffic.

Why would it be better? It would be more complex technically, and certainly less resource efficient. Am i missing something?

It would be more complex, but you'd have a lot more flexibility. Your ISP might not be able to deflect DDoS attacks as efficiently as a remote proxy, you can set up your own caching with a high-speed connection, and you can secure your home network a bit better by only allowing the remote proxy access to your home server.

You'd also save costs moving some of the hosting to the cloud while you're at it, be use you don't don't need to pay a separate electricity bill for a cloud VPS. Plus, VPS storage is usually more reliable than a custom RAID config, as is the power grid around data centers and the internet connection itself.

If you're going for efficency or simplicity then you're totally right, but if you're trying to get value for money I think a cheap VPS would be better.

If you're going to pay $10 a month, you might as well pay for a VPS instead and connect up to it with wireguard, nebula or tailscale. Especially if paying means dynamic IPv4 that isn't behind CGNAT rather than an actual static IPv4 address.

Paying gives you a static IPv4 that remains the same for as long as you're subscribed.

It's not a bad option if you're already paying for gigabit, sadly nearly impossible to get symmetrical gigabit here, but still for an extra $5 or $10 a month it's ok.

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