Hey there!

I’m thinking about starting a blog about privacy guides, security, self-hosting, and other shenanigans, just for my own pleasure. I have my own server running Unraid and have been looking at self-hosting Ghost as the blog platform. However, I am wondering how “safe” it is to use one’s own homelab for this. If you have any experience regarding this topic, I would gladly appreciate some tips.

I understand that it’s relatively cheap to get a VPS, and that is always an option, but it is always more fun to self-host on one’s own bare metal! :)

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 month ago

    I have some static sites that I just rsync to my VPS and serve using Nginx. That’s definitely a good option.

    Agree. And hard to get security wrong cos no database.

    If you want to make it faster by using a CDN and don’t want it to be too hard to set up, you’re going to have to use a CDN service.

    Yes but this can just be a drop-in frontend for the VPS. Point the domain to Cloudflare and tell only Cloudflare where to find the site. This provides IP privacy and also TLS without having to deal with LetsEncrypt. It’s not ideal because… Cloudflare… but at least you’re using standard web tools. To ditch Cloudflare you just unplug them at the domain and you still have a website.

    Perhaps its irrational but I’m bothered by how many people seem to think that Github Pages is the only way to host a static website. I know that’s not your case.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      That’s not Cloudflare-specific; you can use any CDN that supports origin pull in the same way :)

      It’s not ideal because… Cloudflare… but at least you’re using standard web tools. To ditch Cloudflare you just unplug them at the domain and you still have a website.

      Definitely agree with this! That’s one of the pain points of “cloud” services - they really try to lock you in, making it impossible to swotch.

      without having to deal with LetsEncrypt.

      You still need encryption between your CDN and your origin, ideally using a proper certificate. Let’s Encrypt (and other ACME services like ZeroSSL) are pretty easy to use, and can be fully automated. I’m using Let’s Encrypt even for internal servers on my network, using a DNS challenge for verification instead of a HTTP one.

      Perhaps its irrational but I’m bothered by how many people seem to think that Github Pages is the only way to host a static website

      It’s strange because out of all the possible options, Github Pages is the most basic. You have to store your generated files in a Git repo (which is kinda gross) and it barely supports any features. For example, it doesn’t support server logs or redirects.

      I guess it’s popular because people already use Github and don’t want to look for other services?