Greetings! I currently host a number of services on an old pc in my basement. I have ports 80 and 443 forwarded and am running Nginx Proxy Manager as well as Authelia to protect most of them. I have set up a lemmy instance that I am using as my main point of access to the fediverse. I guess I have two questions. I am assuming that hiding lemmy behind Authelia would break Federation (although maybe only one way?), is that correct? And secondly, would it be objectively safer for me to pay for a VPS, run Nginx Proxy Manager there and then forward all of the traffic to the services hosted in my basement server using Tailscale? Thanks!
Not sure about the Lemmy part of the question… but it’ll definitely be safer to run nginx on a VPS and then communicate with your basement box over tailscale. That doesn’t expose your home ip for your services. The other thing you can look into is using a wildcard cert so the specific services you’re ruining aren’t enumerated in your DNS, might not be necessary since you have nginx sitting in front.
Thank you! I have a followup question if you don’t mind. If I host npm on a vps that allows me, say 500GB of data transfer a month, and I am streaming media through a jellyfin instance that I have forwarded through the VPS, will the media I’m streaming count against that transfer amount? This seems like basic information that I should have learned a long time ago.
I think that depends on if the VPS charges incoming and outgoing external connections, some only charge outgoing. From VPS to browser would be outgoing, from your home instance to VPS would be incoming.
Thank you! It does seem like there are afforadable VPS options that don’t limit traffic anyway, so I might as well start there.
Mind sharing which VPs those are?
Like the other poster said, the traffic will go through the VPS. But since you mentioned tailscale, why not just connect to your network over tailscale. You could even use DNS to point to your services (nicer names than IPs) but then the clients would connect directly and you wouldn’t need to route through VPS.