I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.

Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.

I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can’t communicate with each other.

I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don’t anticipate a crush of people.

I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I’ve successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.

I’m not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that’s it.

Anything else I should know? Thanks!

EDIT:

I also have a domain, a couple of them, actually. They’re like potato chips; you can’t stop at just one.

I don’t plan on self-hosting email used for forum registration and announcements. I’m not a masochist.

EDIT for future readers:

I think for now I’m not going to self host anything I intend to be accessed by the public. While I pay the internet bill, my name is on the account, and I own all the equipment, I’m not the only member of this household, so it would be somewhat inconsiderate of me to share our bandwidth with public traffic. In general I think those warning against self-hosting resources one intends to be accessed by the general public are pretty sound.

I tried the Cloudflare tunnel suggestion, but it doesn’t seem to play nice with NodeBB. I can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but I can’t log in. Some quick googling leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets. The first fix I found involves exposing my IP, which defeats the purpose of using a cloudflare tunnel. There may be a way around it, but I frankly can’t be bothered.

  • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    Hosting for yourself so you can access your content outside your home is usually the use-case, use WireGuard for that though (checkout headscale) along with virtualization, VLANs, etc.
    Hosting for a group of friends and/or family can usually be ok, assuming that is a well known and restrict group.

    Hosting for the general public from home is usually not recommended, use a VPS for that. Bear in mind you’ll likely be liable for what you host, one way or the other, depending on your jurisdiction.
    If you store content (files others may upload like movies and photos) you may be responsible for that (i.e. is that content legal in your jurisdiction?).
    There may be a legal distinction between the server’s geographic location and the entity responsible for it - but in your case it’s the same, so, again, beware.
    Just linking to content deemed illegal may get you into trouble.
    Putting the site behind a login-only page and vetting account creation could mitigate (or exponentiate) this.
    Anyway IANAL.

    What do you want to host and for whom?