Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Is self-hosting safe, and if so, where do I start? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 week ago by Dop@lemmy.zip to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hi,

The last google product that is use is gmail, and while searching for a solid alternative, many threads mentionned self hosting, which has been on my mind for a little while but here is what's stopping me so far: 1/ it sounds like a single point vulnerability 2/ I lack the skills.

As for #2, I've been down the privacy rabbithole for a couple years now, I know there are a lot of resources out there and I'm not afraid to learn, I just don't know where to start.

But I don't see the point in learning if in the end, I just build a server that could die in a domestic accident, resulting in me loosing a lot of important data.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated,

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[–] irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's as safe as you make it. Read up and use configurations documented for "production environments" and you have to monitor things yourself. Try to avoid exposing anything to the internet that you don't have to and use a secure VPN if you can. That limits the exposed attack surface quite a bit.

Otherwise, use things like crowdsec and/or fail2ban along with ensuring your firewalls are configured to drop all ports not needed. A reverse proxy like Traefik or Caddy in front of all of your web services along with valid TLS/SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt can help to only need port 443 open most of the time. Crowdsec or fail2ban can then be integrated into the reverse proxy as well to simplify things. It can be difficult to set up the first service, but then things start to fall into place over time.

Also, be sure to document everything you do, so that you can reproduce it if you need to recover from a disaster as well as to make setting up new services easier.

[–] Dop@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Thank you for the advice, I always prepare backups before my fuckups and i assume there will be some fuckups whike i learn haha